Plone 4 ist die jüngste Version des "State-of-the-Art" Open Source CMS. Es ist schneller, leistungsfähiger und attraktiver als zuvor.

"Ich habe die schallaburg.at website testweise auf Plone 4 migriert.
Zeitinvestment: 15min
Speed: unfassbar schnell.
Bin voll und ganz beeindruckt!! Plone 4 rocks. Diesmal wirklich!"

Roland Fasching ist Entwickler bei der Niederösterreich Kulturwirtschaft GmbH und betreut dort über 30 Plone Portale.

Was ist neu in Plone 4?

Plone 4 ist seit September 2010 als offizielle Release verfügbar. Es legt das Hauptaugenmerk auf Geschwindigkeit, Skalierbarkeit und Benutzerfreundlichkeit — Alles verbunden mit einfacher Installation sowohl für Neuinstallationen als auch Upgrades bestehender Sites.

Plone ist ein ausgefeiltes, leistungsfähiges und benutzerfreundliches Content Management System. Wenn Sie Plone schon kennen, werden Sie Plone 4 als angenehme und wertvolle Weiterentwicklung entdecken. Die Vorteile sind sofort für alle Benutzer-Gruppen fühlbar – Endanwender, Redakteure und Entwickler werden begeistert sein. Wenn Sie Plone erstmalig entdecken, werden Sie verstehen, warum Plone zwar nicht Mainstream ist, aber wegen seiner herausragenden Eigenschaften von vielen großen Organisationen gegenüber weniger sicheren und unflexibleren Systemen bevorzugt wird.

Plone 4 ist...

• Sauschnell. Plone 4 ist im Allgemeinen über 50% schneller als Plone 3, mit deutlichen Verbesserungen sowohl für Webbesucher als auch für angemeldete Benutzer. Plone 4 ist eine der schnellsten Open-Source CMS Plattformen am Markt.

• Attraktiv. Plone 4 besitzt ein brandneues Standard Design mit dem Namen "Sunburst". Es ist aufgeräumt, minimalistisch, modern und leicht anzupassen.

• Benutzerfreundlich. Das Plone 4 Interface wurde rundum feingeschliffen und aufpoliert, um es deutlich intuitiver zu machen. Plone 4 bietet ab sofort einen neuen leistungsfähigeren grafischen HTML Editor (TinyMCE) an, bietet deutlich weiterentwickelte Voreinstellungsmöglichkeiten und einiges mehr.

• Leicht installierbar und zu aktualisieren. Wie für die vorhergehenden Versionen von Plone, sind downloadbare "One-Klick" Installer für Windows, Mac und Linux verfügbar. In 10 Minuten haben Sie ein Plone auf Ihrem Rechner in Betrieb. Plone 4 lässt sich hervorragend von Plone 3 upgraden.

Unter der Haube

• Plone 4 geht wesentlich effizienter mit Speicher um und kann große Dateien wie Bilder und Videos wesentlich schneller ausliefern.
• Das ganze auf Python & NoSQL basierende System wartet im neuen barrierefreien Design darauf mit Leichtigkeit auf Anwenderbedürfnisse angepaßt zu werden.

Plone Powered

• Große Unternehmen, KMU's, Non-Profit Organisationen, Universitäten und Regierungs-Organisationen um die ganze Welt wählen Plone für ihre Websites, Intranets und Extranets. Immer wenn Sicherheit, Skalierbarkeit, Barrierefreiheit and Anpassbarkeit an die geforderte Struktur zählt — liefert Plone die Basis der Lösung.
• Plone kann Referenzen von Sites von Nokia, Amnesty International, Discover Magazine, der Brasilianischen Regierung, des Nordic Council, der Universitäten des MIT, Harvard & Penn State, Bonn, München, Freiburg und Berlin, die Site der Free Software Foundation und tausende namhafte Referenzen vorweisen.

Mehr infos auf deutsch?

Deutschsprachige Informationen rund um Plone und den von Plone verwendeten Applikationsserver Zope finden Sie auf -> www.zope.de

Tipp: Besuchen Sie die Plone Vorträge auf der DZUG-Tagung der Deutschsprachigen Zope User Group vom 15.-17. September an der TU Dresden -> www.zope.de

Tipp: Die Internationale Plone Konferenz ist 2010 wieder in Europa – vom 25. bis 31. Oktober in Bristol, England -> ploneconf2010.org

Ansprechpartner der BlueDynamics Alliance sind auf der DZUG-Tagung und der Plone Conference vertreten. Wir stehen für Sie zur Verfügung!

Wenn Sie nicht selbst anreisen können: Die Talks der Plone Conference werden live gestreamt und sind in der Regel später online verfügbar.

Vielen Dank an Armin Stroß-Radschinski für die Übersetzung des Original-Textes von plone.org und
die Ergänzung um für den deutschen Sprachraum interessante Informationen.

How websites were themed before

Almost always Web Designers have to know at least some internals about the templating system if they want to deliver a complete theme, ready to integrate in the particular Content Management System. Often, Web Developers have then to touch the templates again to fit to their and the CMS needs. But most of the time a static HTML template is created by a Web Designer which has to be transformed by a Web Developer to the template language in use.

The only things left to the Web Designer for easy modification are the CSS files. If the Web Designer has no access to the project's development repository, the Web Developer has again to integrate them. In the case of Plone, there is the portal_skins/custom folder which allows theme updates through the web - but all of these cases aren't optimal.

And then there was Deliverance

With Deliverance a revolutionary web design workflow was introduced.

PyPi says: "Deliverance does transformations of HTML to 'theme' pages, similar in function to XSLT but using a simpler XML-based language to express the transformation." [3]

Okay, we could have used XSLT before and besides to the Deliverance development team many kudos also have to go to those XML heads. But i hardly know someone who uses XSLT for theming websites. XSLT alone cant make the design workflow much easier as it is.

With deliverance we create a file where we express transformation rules which define how content-bits from the source HTML (which comes from the CMS system) should replace specific tags or their contents in a target theme (which is the static HTML template) - all in an easily understandable XML syntax. All elements from source and target are selectable via CSS selectors or XPath expressions. The target HTML template should be tagged with id- or class attributes, so that the relevant elements can be easily accessed via CSS selectors.

This allows empowers Web Designers to constantly improve their theme as long as they respect the Deliverance rules which modify their template on the fly.

For more information about writing rules read the Deliverance documentation [4].

Now everything with Dropbox

Dropbox [5] is a commercial file sharing provider which offers 2GB space in the cloud for free. The cool thing with Dropbox is, that it provides a client program which creates a folder in your home directory where local copies of the files from your online Dropbox folder are stored. You can edit those files or create new ones and the changes are immediately pushed to the server - and in the case of a shared folder to all subscribers of that folder. Dropbox also comes with basic versioning support.

The uncool thing with Dropbox is, that the protocol and Dropbox daemon are closed source. The other parts of the Dropbox client are open sourced, at least for Linux.

If the static HTML template is developed in an shared Dropbox folder and integrated into Deliverance via a symlink, all changes to the templates are immediately visible by all developers with that setup - normally within 5 seconds.

And because the need for design changes don't stop with website deployment, this setup can also be used for a live server. All involved parties just have to be aware about the risk of breaking the site if a modified HTML structure interferes with the Dropbox rules. But this allows Web Designers to tweak the design independently of Web developers. And this is cool.

This technique was used for the new website of Grüne Akademie Steiermark [6]. A simmilar setup without Dropbox integration on the server was first used for the Gnome WGO project [7].

Some tips when using Dropbox in your buildout environment

Let's say, the static HTML templates are developed in this folder:

/home/USER/Dropbox/website-template

and Deliverance expects it's template-directory here:

/home/USER/dev/website-buildout/static

To use the Dropbox templates with deliverance, just link the directory like so:

ln -s /home/USER/Dropbox/website-template /home/USER/dev/website-buildout/static

If you don't want to use Dropbox on your live server - for what some heavy reasons can be found - you can check in the files into your favorite Version Control System. Since you may want to check in all the files and not only the symlink, you may have to mount the Dropbox folder instead of linking it:

mount --bind /home/USER/Dropbox/website-template /home/USER/dev/website-buildout/static

Attention: Don't delete your website-buildout directory because this would also delete the Dropbox folder! You have to unmount it before or use the '-o ro' mount option for read only access.

References

• [1] http://www.coactivate.org/projects/deliverance/introduction
• [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dropbox_%28storage_provider%29
• [3] http://pypi.python.org/pypi/Deliverance/
• [4] http://deliverance.openplans.org/
• [5] https://www.dropbox.com
• [6] http://gruene-akademie.at/
• [7] http://svn.plone.org/svn/collective/gnomeweb-plone/
  

Now after two successful days of the sprint  we have a good outcome.

Michael Launay and Vincent Fretin from Ecreall  (Lille/ France) arrived Wednesday evening after a 1000km car-ride and joined Robert and Jens at BlueDynamics Office in Innsbruck Thursday morning. After synchronizing our minds showing what was done so far we started pair-programming. We expected Gogo from Vienna to join us in the evening, but he got ill and was not able to get on his flight. But fortunately he started to help out remotely.

Michael + Jens worked on the UML internal model. The import of XMI to UML, and the internal model (class-diagram) representaion was already finished by Jens and Robert in the last 3 weeks. Now the real difficult work had to be done: Get useful information out of the model. We wrote some convinience classes following roughly the adpater pattern (but not using ZCA here). Its all tested and documented by doctests - I'd say we have a very good coverage. Most of the time was needed to find the edge-cases in modelling.

Vincent + Robert paired to work on the transformation and generation of Python-code. The connection of the transformations as a chain works now. The generation for filesystem-structures is almost done. Python generation is work in progress and task for today. Gogo helped here by taking specific tasks. All code is tested and documented with doctests as well.

Today we plan to finish the UML convinience API and get the core work for Python-code-representation in a tree done. If this is done we can start writing our first real code generation chain: And what will it be? No, not Plone-code: We will generate AGX-generators! This means: python eggs, packages, modules, methods, classes and decorators.

for the agx-sprint team

-- Jensens

After the great Plone Conference in Budapest and its sprint we did a huge step forward to a working AGX transformation chain. Last friday november the 6th we sprinted internally on the AGX engine and now have a working XMI to UML transformation. Some tiny bits are missing, but the overall transformation works. The UML to Python transformation is about 40% finished either.

We invite everybody interested in writing handlers for code generation to a three day development-sprint in Innsbruck.

Goals are:

1. Getting more people into AGX and showing them the easiness of writing AGX transforms.
2. Finish the Python-Code-Generation
3. Invent a domain-specifc UML language (profile) for Dexterity.
4. Generate Dexterity types for Plone 4.
   

It will be held at the office of Klein & Partner KEG. We start at November 26th at 9:00 am. Our office is available the whole 24h of 3 days until Nov 28th. We help booking accomodiation and recommend Hotel Zillertal  (where we probably get 10% reduction - waiting for conformation). Snacks, lunch-buffet and drinks are available. For those still needing x-mas presents I can recommend the famous Christkindl-Market.

Contact: jens@bluedynamics.com

BlueDynamics Alliance is at Plone Conference in Budapest! Peter Holzer, Robert Niederreiter and me, Jens Klein. Also Johannes Raggam, our intern from last year is here.

Its good to meet all the people from Plone Community. Amazing how many new people are here!

We are listing to some interesting talks and if theres no we started to sprint on AGX, the framework for tree-transformations which is the base of the new (Code-) Generator.

I prepared a lighting talk on cornerstone.soup, our lightweight isolated conatainer for queryable records - based on ZTKand made for Plone.

Robert prepared a lightning talk about AGX. Johannes will show the outcome of his thesis, a "activity model runtime engine for python" - which uses AGX and the underlying zodict-Node.