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Sprint Report, Plone Symposium East 2012

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About 30 members of the Plone community participated in a 3-day sprint at WebLion, following Plone Symposium East 2012. We worked on PloneEdu, Plone Installation on Windows, ZopeSkel Documentation, Plone Accessibility, a promising new product called plone.app.toolbar, and a follow-up dose of Code Cleanup and Removal.

Thanks to Steve McMahon for leading our sprint; to team captains Kim Nguyen, Ross Patterson, Cris Ewing, Matt Barkau, Nathan Van Gheem, and Eric Steele; and finally, to Mark Corum and Rob Porter for...um...naming this the Hot! Hot! Hot! Sprint.

Here are the teams and what we accomplished:

PloneEdu

Plans include fresh content, a site facelift, and new hosting for PloneEdu, a resource for educational institutions using Plone.

Team: Kim Nguyen, Mark Corum, Rob Porter, Chris Thomas, Brian Davis, William Fennie,  Prathmesh Mengane, Greg O'Toole

Accomplishments:
  • Defined the PloneEdu audience
  • Made plans to migrate the site's hosting to Oshkosh
  • Began an information architecture review for the front page based on new priorities
  • Established a schedule for publishing news, and developed a process for using Yahoo Pipes to  drive news to PloneEdu from Twitter and other institutions' RSS feeds
  • Began wireframing the new home page design, content, and navigation
  • Authored fresh content, including a features list with the most important features prioritized and a list of the key advantages of using Plone in education

Plone Installation on Windows 

At the Cioppino Sprint and afterwards, Ross Patterson developed a proof of concept of Plone fully controlled by IIS and served through FastCGI via WSGIall based on the Unified Installer so that users will find it consistent with UI documentation.  The goal is to give Windows users a Plone experience much more tightly integrated with tools that they are familiar withboth deployment and development oriented and supported by Microsoft going forward.  See Ross' blog post for more details leading up to this sprint.

Team: Ross Patterson, Craig Haynal, David Hietpas, Hanno Schlichting

Accomplishments:
  • Researched installation options, including using Visual Studio
  • Succeeded at building binary eggs on Windows platform, researched how to get the last bits in the installer chain working
  • Explored WSGI integration with Microsoft IIS
  • As a side benefit, they squashed two long-standing Windows-related bugs in Plone

ZopeSkel Documentation 

ZopeSkel 3.0 is in beta.  Local commands have been restored to the underlying Templer system.  And there's a Sphinx documentation package waiting for us to write down the canonical truth of how to use this tool.  Help untangle the mess of conflicting information and restore sanity to the Ploniverse.

Team: Cris Ewing, Sally Kleinfeldt, Brandon Gaddie

Accomplishments:
  • Wrote and published documentation for how to use ZopeSkel and the underlying system, Templer. The manual covers installation procedures, aspects of the system, and how to interact with it. See the new ZopeSkel/Templer docs at templer-manual.readthedocs.org.
  • Created a package for setting up a Django project using the system. This provides an example of how other frameworks can work with Templer.
  • Developed plans for collecting information on all ZopeSkel documentation currently available, with the goal of evaluating this documentation and correcting errors. 

Plone Accessibility

This work helped to make Plone more usable for people who rely on assistive technologies while improving mobile user experience and possibly search-engine optimization. Code ready for review and commit enables Plone 4.1 to pass automated accessibility tests for the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) version 2.0, level AA.

Team: Matt Barkau, Paul Roeland, Paul Rentschler, Seth Palmer, Heather Harter, Steve McMahon, Eric Steele

Accomplishments:
  • Tied help text in with the Archetypes form field
  • Fixed "Read more..." links so that they are no longer ambiguous
  • Worked on making Plone folder listing, tabular view, and thumbnail views consistently accessible
  • Switched Event Item view from table to headings
  • Worked on adding appropriate headings to portlets and page sections
  • Made the overlay "Close" icon a link
  • Did lots of other small fixes to improve accessibility compliance

plone.app.toolbar 

A work in progress, this product provides a toolbar (based on the Twitter Bootstrap JavaScript Library) that replaces different parts of Plone's authenticated user interface. The toolbar's drop-down menus lead to controls displayed in overlays. This prevents CSS in theme products from interfering with the appearance of authenticated controls and helps with sites themed using Diazo.

Team: Nathan Van Gheem, Joel Kleier, Andy Leeb, Ian Anderson, Fulvio Casali

Accomplishments:
  • Dropdowns, including edit, contents, sharing, site setup, advanced, etc.all of these now pop up in an overlay instead of making the user navigate to a new page.
  • The edit control pops up in an overlay with tinyMCE working within it. Other edit controls open within the same overlay.
  • Plans made to refine the flow, i.e., which links should keep the user within the overlay vs. which should return the user to the content item.

Code Cleanup and Removal

This was a continuation of the Pre-PSE12 Strategicesque Sprintacular, which involved lots more members of the Plone community.

Team: Eric Steele, Hanno Schlichting

Accomplishments:
  • Fixed a CSS-related blocker for 4.2's release

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