plonewars.com

Preface

This report describes my final assignment for my study Informatics at
the Rotterdam Institute for Informatics Studies (RIVIO) of the
Hogeschool Rotterdam. The assignment lasted from February till June
2007. It was carried out for web development company Zest Software in
Hoogvliet, The Netherlands. I have been working there since November
2005. Previous reports for school of my work for Zest Software
(including this report) can be found on my website.

The main subject of this report is eXtremeManagement. This is a
project management tool for the open source content management system
Plone. At Zest Software we use this tool on a daily basis to keep
track of what our customers want and how much time we have worked for
them.

This eXtremeManagement tool can use some updates, which is the goal of
this assignment. The focus is on the underlying technology: using
more and more features made available by newer versions of Plone and
the Zope web development framework that Plone is built on. Also some
user interface improvements will be made.

I thank Hans Manni from RIVIO for keeping me on track for finishing my
study. I thank Aad van Raamt for being the second teacher next to
Hans on the committee. I thank Jean-Paul and Esther Ladage for giving
me the opportunity to work on eXtremeManagement for five months. I
thank Reinout for the photo on the front page. I thank my colleagues
from all over the world for their feedback, their own additions to
eXtremeManagement and for making Zest Software a very nice team to
work and have fun with.

Conclusion

eXtremeManagement has been given a thorough cleanup. It runs on the
current Plone 3.0 beta. Where useful, Zope 3 technologies have been
put to good use. Personally, I have learned a lot about these new
software versions and I am sharing that knowledge on my weblog and in
mailing lists. At Zest Software we are happily using the latest
version of eXtremeManagement and are full of ideas for further
improvement.

Some recommendations and further actions to take:

• Release a new version of eXtremeManagement soon: it is ready.
• Building on the foundation laid during this assignment, do more work
  on the user interface. There are lots of ideas floating around.
  See Future plans (Appendix A).
• Once Plone 3.0 is officially out, copy the current subversion trunk
  to a maintenance branch and continue development for Plone 3.0 only
  on trunk.

In closing, I will say I had a great time with eXtremeManagement and
its users and co-developers on the mailing list. eXtremeManagement is
a rocking product, ready to handle the future.

Abstract

This report describes my final assignment for school, which is:
improve the eXtremeManagement tool: a project management tool based on
Extreme Programming principles and running on content management
system Plone.

The Introduction (chapter 1) paints the landscape of this assignment. What is
Zope? What is Plone? What is eXtremeManagement? How do they fit
together?

I made some improvements to the User Interface (chapter 2). Most of the
original ideas there were not implemented however, for various
reasons, ranging from simple lack of time to fresh insights that
invalidated the original plan. The focus of the assignment was
shifted to improving the core, instead of the front door.

Plone 3.0 (chapter 3) tells the tale of getting eXtremeManagement ready to run
on the new (still in beta status) version 3.0 of Plone. I did some
standard fixes applicable to all third party Plone products. I also
did some other changes that were found to be needed. Finally I added
an improvement to core Plone to make this upgrade easier for other
products.

With Zope 3 (chapter 4) we come to the heart of the matter. More than
originally envisioned the focus needed to be put here. I added marker
and functional interfaces. I created browser views to make a clearer
Model-View-Controller distinction. I introduced annotations for
keeping track of estimates and hours worked. All three work together
to make a far cleaner version of eXtremeManagement than was there at
the beginning of this assignment.

I draw the Conclusion (chapter 5) that eXtremeManagement is clean and future-proof
and that I have learned a lot in this assignment.