fidzu : Plone

29 Nov 2024 10:25pm GMT

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29 Nov 2024 1:54pm GMT

Summary

Oshane Bailey, a talented Plone developer with loads of Plone experience has been selected as a presenter for the 2018 Tokyo Plone Conference. His Japanese visa was just approved.
He will share a streamlined approach to Plone development that he is applying on a Plone project targeted at Jamaican Developers. At the time of writing he has raised about 17% of the funds he needs to get to Tokyo. You can help him get to Japan by contributing to his crowd-funding campaign.

Oct 29, 2018 update
Thanks to generous contributions, Oshane's trip is now 70% funded. You are welcome to join the crowdfund and cover the rest of his trip.

Oct 30, 2018 update
Oshane's trip is now 89% funded. The plane ticket and conference ticket have been purchased. you can still pitch in by joining the crowdfund to cover the rest of his trip.

Since at least 2015, Oshane has worked on Plone projects for teams around the world and in the process has been exposed to varied approaches to the development and ongoing management of Plone sites. Over recent months he has poured his, hard earned, experience, into a side project -- the Jamaican Developers site. Through this project he has refined a continuous development pipeline based on some of the best techniques used in the Plone community and enhanced with some of his own innovations.

Last year Oshane participated as a Plone Google Summer of Code student and presented his work at the Barcelona conference. He also participated in the after-conference sprints, contributing to efforts to port Plone to Python 3 and also looking into the WebSauna project.

Supporting his trip to Tokyo will serve to enrich PloneConf 2018 in many ways. Here are three that spring immediately to mind:
1) As part of his talk he will share the techniques he is using on the Jamaican Developers site
2) He plans to participate in the after conference sprints.
3) He will bring an important perspective to discussions influenced by constraints common to Jamaican developers.

How to Support Oshane

Appropriately, his crowdfunding campaign is running on the Jamaican Developers site that he built with Plone. His goal is to raise enough to cover his travel and expenses related to the Japan trip.

As we say in Jamaica... "Follow back a me" as I support Oshane's trip to PloneConf2018 in Tokyo.

24 Oct 2018 3:38am GMT

I decided to try a Maurits van Rees and live blog a conference talk.
Talk by Timo Stollenwerk on Building Bridges - The Headless Future of Plone



Plone's headless future

Working on what we call headless these days started in 2014
You already heard a part of this from the Keynote (about Pastanaga UI etc..) on the first day so I won't repeat that.
My ultimate goal is to bring the vision to reality.

A few observations

• Mobile is overtaking Desktop (Plone is mobile ready but Pastanaga aims to have the best experience on every device)
• Open Source is Mainstream (Plone is different, today large open source projects are coming from large players like Facebook and Google, this helps to make open source more mainstream). Github looked at contributions last year and visual studio code was the project that had the most contributions... Microsoft!!)
• Javascript is taking over (Javascript is becoming more important, if you are a web developer in 2017 you have to learn modern Javascript)
• The Web is everywhere (I visited my Uncle who is a Doctor, 5 years ago and noted that he was using a web app on his desktop for viewing scans of the body)

In recent studies they discovered that swift is losing popularity because web technologies are taking over. The web is coming back with technologies like Electron (Desktop) and Cordova (mobile)

Isn't it a great time to be a Web, Javascript, Open Source developer in 2017?

We're hearing that the CMS market is dead

If we see it in other sectors we say it is more efficient but when it happens to us we don't want to transform ourselves for the better. I think we are living in exciting times...

If JS is so great why don't we just go with it and build a CMS with Javascript?

Why do we keep using Python and Plone?

• I love Python (wasn't my first language, but the first one I loved, I still miss Python with every line of Javascript I write). I can live with Javascript for the tooling and the community but would prefer to keep Python. I can't imagine using Node on the backend because I think Python is doing a way better job on the backend.
• Plone the community. In the last year I've been to Jenkins, CI and testing conferences but there's no place like Plone.

I went to a JS conference alone. Usually when you go to a conference alone you need to make an effort to talk to persons. Then I went to the sprint but out of 1000 persons there were only 20 or 30 persons at the Sprint. When I speak to Python conference attendees they ask me, how do you get people to come and even pay for a flight to Plone conferences, it's like magic!

• Plone the Software is still unique (permissions, traversal, workflows)
• Plone the CMS (as Eric says, Plone is doing Breadcrumbs since 2001) Go out and try all the Javascript CMSes, they all have awful user interfaces, they have nice libraries and everything you can imagine but lack the basic functionality of a CMS. I couldn't just jump and move to another system because I'd only have half or 10% of the current functionailty I have now. We don't want to become Grandpas and isolate the new JS communities who have lots of energy

What do we have now?

Stabilising JS frameworks, it's not too hard to switch between VueJS, React, Angular. Which one you use depends on if you like a library vs a framework. How do we handle this? We want to give our clients something that can be supported over the next 5 to 10 years. That's a lot of time. If you look at Plone we are able to provide that. How do you handle that? The answer is plone.restapi (restful hypermedia for Plone).

Our idea with plone.restapi is to use it as a bridge. Stability on the backend with flexibility on the frontend. In two or three years the JS ecosystem will change further.

Status of plone.restapi

It is stable and used for 3 years, it is used in production by several companies. We consider plonerest.api to be feature complete.
I asked Eric what is plonerest.api missing, he said "nothing".

I'm just lazy about releasing a 1.0 release.

We can get back to our vision with plone.restapi being stable.

So we can get back to our vision of bridging...? One of our ideas about building with Plone 5

You can use React in the core today, if you want to go with a full framework like Angular you can too. We have 3 branches and the plonerest.api allows us to build bridges between
standard plone and the other branches.

How do we make this happen?

Regarding stories... Victor sometime says to me "Should we really say that, going on stage and telling people about these things? They will expect it to happen."

So who here would like to have Pastanaga UI today and use it. With projects in the Plone community we've building like that...

when we should be building like this..

I believe that if we want to have that we need to start with the Minimal viable product. Something, not just for users but for companies that can give them value right away. I want that skateboard.

What do we need to get that skateboard?

• Login
• Content Editing
• Image upload

That might sound easy but it is not. We're aiming for making Plone stand out, we want people to be like "wow, that's the greatest editing experience I've ever had". I want us to iterate over that and focus on that user story.
I want to make image upload really easy. One thing we need to solve on a technical level, we currently have created a Medium-like editor but we don't have image scaling (something we take for granted in Plone). I want us to have the ability to add the image and have scaling done "magically".

There are things that are essential for an MVP

• Performance
• Image uploading
• SEO

If we don't have this, users will abandon pages. Modern page builders focus on this (e.g. gatsby js is a modern page builder built in ReactJS). If you want to compete we have to provide users with a great out of the box performance. We'll need to use all the tooling, webpack etc...
We will also need server-side rendering. We saw that, without server-side rendering at kitconcept we can't do good SEO.

Visit https://github.com/plone/pastanaga#minimal-viable-product for details on our projections of a MVP.

Next

We have an open space at the conference and there will be sprints.
Real world projects (if you have any projects and want to use plone.restapi, angular sdk, plone.react, please talk to us)
At kticoncept we have a few projects where will do that
Sponsorship (we may be able to do something on that front)

Summary

We have a stable platform in plone.restapi for building bridges
I think Plone's future is bright is we combine our knowledge and experience with the new things
Pastanaga UI is really greate
I hope we can provide you with a roadmap
The great thing about the Plone community is tha tyou start with an idea and...
let's get together and do Plone magic together!

19 Oct 2017 8:48am GMT

Jamaica to Catalonia for Plone Conference 2017

TL;DR - David Bain and Oshane Bailey are looking to attend the 2017 Plone Conference via crowd funding.

• Sept 20, 2017 Update: We will mostly be walking so this reduces our transportation costs, we've adjusted our target to reflect this. We've extended the campaign until September 27.
• Sept 17, 2017 Update: We're finding some cheaper fares, adjusting our target to reflect this
• Sept 16, 2017 Update: Oshane has been offered a free room, this will lower the overall target further
• Update: It looks like there are more cost effective accommodation options, as a result, we've further adjusted our estimates.
• Update: We have found some cheaper flights via Google Flights so we're adjusting our estimates down by $2,000.

(David's the one on the right).

This is a manually managed crowdfunding tracker updated by David (no AI was harmed in the creation of this tracker)


We are trying to get from Jamaica to Catalonia for the 2017 Plone conference. Our target is to raise a significant part of the roughly USD$7,000 USD$5000 USD$4,400 USD$3,700 USD$2,900 needed to cover airfare, accommodation etc.

How to support us

You can contribute to our travels via Paypal (see the button below), funds go to my Paypal account.

Why support us?

Getting us there will allow David to deliver training and a talk or two, Oshane will be able to share his Google Summer of Code experiences and participate in his first face to face community sprint after the conference. Oshane worked this summer on improving the theme editor experience, here are some links with more information about what he did...
https://community.plone.org/t/gsoc-2017-improving-the-theme-editor-experience/3906
https://community.plone.org/t/thank-you-for-the-support-during-gsoc-2017/4792
We're hoping he'll be able to present his experience as a talk at the conference.

David has been an active part of the community for many years. He delivered training and two talks at the last conference and has been invited to be part of the training team at the 2017 conference as well.

Both of us are really excited to participate this year, however the cost of airfare is prohibitive.

* While Oshane will stay for the sprints, due to family commitments, David won't be able to stay for the sprints.

Rough Breakdown of expenses

07 Sep 2017 1:23am GMT

Presenting... Why you had problems figuring out Plone (the webinar). Okay, that's not the actual name of the webinar. Instead, we went with the more descriptive but slightly less clever Plone for Newbies - The Big Picture.

The Big Picture is about understanding the model.

If you're a developer about to begin your journey of Plone development, The Big Picture aims to fill out your understanding of how the pieces of Plone fit together. Thinking of it as a purpose built system lays a strong foundation for success.

Only smart persons use Plone

I've heard someone suggest that you have to be really smart to use Plone (implying that it is hard to use). I call it the "this helicopter is harder to use than my bicycle" problem. Every time I benefit from Plone's link integrity support, flexible access control model or use cut and paste to move content around I'm glad I'm not using a "bicycle". I like to point out Plone's comprehensive suite of tools which you'll be glad exist when you need them. For developers, once you accept that you're looking at a "helicopter" you need to spend a little time "understanding the model". As you understand the purpose of the major controls you'll find it easier to use the system to solve problems.

Why Plone?

Now is the right time, with an increase of cybersecurity related issues, organizations should be looking to adopt secure platforms. I've been using Plone for more than 15 years, and I can confidently recommend it as a secure platform. In case you took your eye of Plone for a few years, now is a great time to give it a second look, it has kept up with modern development practices and remains an excellent choice for your content management needs.

Why a webinar?

My target audience isn't in one geographic location, the most effective way to reach them is a virtual medium and webinars provide a well-known, tried and tested approach.
Additionally, I have run one or two webinars before, if you count online training courses. Of course, it is different when you are doing more than just showing up, reaching out to a "less captive" audience and convincing them to commit 90 minutes to a webinar. So this is new ground for me. I am learning a lot from this experience and have had a fleeting thought, maybe I'll take all this webinar and Plone stuff and do the "meta" thing, build a webinar management tool on top of Plone. You never know.

03 Aug 2017 10:32pm GMT

After you've created a custom content type through the web (TTW), you'll want a custom view to go with it. In this simple example we create a custom youtube page content type and a supporting view all TTW.

Step 1 - Create a new content type

Start by creating the content type through the Dexterity Types control panel.

Site Setup > Dexterity Types

Select and clone the "Page".

.. ..
Then add a "youtube_url" field.

After adding your first "Youtube page" you'll notice that the default view isn't showing us the "youtube_url" field that we added. We'll fix that in the next step.

Step 2 - Create a custom rapido view

.. ..
The video below explores the building blocks of our custom view. After some tinkering we settle on the id youtube-page-view for our view.
.. ..

Gotchas with registering view ids

What was not recorded in the video was the fact that the view id youtube-page had been used in the context of a different rapdio block (I was practicing before the real recording). If you were paying careful attention to the demo video you may have noticed some unusual behaviour when trying to use the view named youtube-page. When you define a view id and then change it later on, the id expects to work with the originally registered block. I've found that restarting the instance resolves this issue.

29 Jun 2017 2:09am GMT

In a recent post (https://community.plone.org/t/textareas-not-displaying-existing-content-when-my-theme-is-enabled/4117/2?u=pigeonflight) I mentioned a Diazo rule where I was injecting a new class into a tag, I used an <xsl:template>.

The following example adds a special class "gl-textarea" to all <textarea> elements it uses a Diazo <replace> directive instead of an <xsl:template>.
... ....

A note about Diazo, <xsl:template> and nested scenarios

<xsl:template> elements in nested rules will fail silently. This also means that externally included files will also fail because rules in externally included files are implicitly nested.
So something like this, if located in the main rules.xml file, should work:

<rules>
<xsl:template>
...
</xsl:template>
</rules>

This will fail, because it is in a nested <rules> element.

<rules>
<rules>
<xsl:template>
...
</xsl:template>
</rules>
</rules>

On the other hand, Diazo's <replace> directive can be used as a work-alike to the <xsl:template> element and it works in nested scenarios.

Don't do this

Here's the <xsl:template> approach which works in very specific scenarios.
... ...

When you can do this

For comparison, here again, is an example that uses the <replace> directive and should work in most scenarios.
... ....
Don't forget to include the apply-template, it is needed.

14 Jun 2017 11:28pm GMT

TL;DR looking at other people's code - my first steps in getting started with creating custom tiles for Mosaic involved looking at how other people did it.

Mosaic is a layout solution for Plone which allows end users to create custom page layouts within a Plone website (video) using a simple drag and drop. There are ready made tiles for common situations, however I am starting to come across situations where the default tiles aren't what I want.

I decided it was time to explore the creation of custom tiles. I figured the best way to get going would be to look at how others have created custom tiles. I knew that custom tiles were used in the creation of the Plone 2016 conference website and that the source code for the site was published on github. I started by inspecting their code.

I setup Plone 5.0.7 with Mosaic 2.0rc5 and also the ploneconf2016 site profile (https://github.com/plone/ploneconf2016.policy). The code for the tile configuration is here: https://github.com/plone/ploneconf2016.policy/tree/master/ploneconf2016/policy/tiles

Once everything was installed I was able to create a fake conference website and add presentations, persons (speakers/presenters) and a few other content types.

The policy defines two custom tiles

• A slider tile
• A presentation tile

I was able to use both custom tiles without issue, the slider custom tile doesn't work out the box, meaning I could define the slides but the actual sliding didn't work. The slider depends on other components that are provided by the ploneconf2016 theme. It shouldn't be too hard to add the right CSS and JS to my own theme to get the slider working the way I want.

One note, when I cheated by not including a speaker on my presentation item, things "broke". To be fair this is to be expected since the presentation content type does have a red dot indicating that speakers are required items on presentations.

I got this error on the console

```
...
Module zope.component._api, line 120, in queryMultiAdapter
Module zope.interface.registry, line 245, in queryMultiAdapter
Module zope.interface.adapter, line 541, in queryMultiAdapter
Module plone.jsonserializer.deserializer.converters, line 69, in from_unicode_converter
Module zope.schema._field, line 322, in fromUnicode
Module zope.schema._bootstrapfields, line 183, in validate
Module zope.schema._field, line 338, in _validate
ConstraintNotSatisfied: (u'350d0a34ffcb4fc4943efdcf4bdb9f03', 'content_uid')
```

A quick guess... the content_uid was probably referring to the missing speaker.

I consider this a great first experiment. I have all the pieces working and I know how the code was put together. My next steps are 1) customize one of the conference tiles 2) create and register a brand new tile of my own.

07 Jun 2017 12:03pm GMT

Starting December 1, 2016 the Alteroo team will be available for new Plone gigs.

Our team members are ready to dive into modern Plone development including Diazo and Mosaic on Plone 5. We also have experience with older versions of Plone.

If you're into checking boxes we also have experience with Javascript/ReactJS/Webpack/Babel, Pyramid/Kotti, Firebase, QA, Linux server administration and General Design skills.

Send an email to newgigs - [ at ]- alteroo.com.

30 Nov 2016 9:17pm GMT

This is part 2 of installing Plone 5 on Windows. The following instructions are specific to installing Plone 5 on Windows. Part 1 covered preparing your Windows machine for Plone.

Assumptions

• Your system has been configured using the steps outlined in part 1 (see: prepare your Windows machine for Plone).
• You have a reasonably reliable internet connection

17 Nov 2016 6:10pm GMT