Being a curious sort, I got up the gumption to install Plone 2.1 Alpha 2 on my desktop box today, just to see how it’s coming along. Aaron at NetCorps, being even somewhat bolder, did this a couple of weeks ago and liked what he saw.
I, too, am pretty excited. Plone 2.1 is currently heading for a late July/early August launch, and it’s shaping up to be a major leap forward that belies the “point one” (or “point oh-five”) version number increase.
The things that I think will have a big immediate impact on the average ONE/Northwest website include:
Smart Folders — a total refactoring (and renaming) of the confusing-and-thus-not-very-useful “Topics” feature. Most importantly, Smart Folders has a great new UI that lets a non-technical user create dynamic listings of different types of content. It’s gonna be great for quickly creating flexible listings of events, news items, document libraries, etc.
On a related note, listings of items can now be instantly sorted without reloading the entire page. Really nice usability trick.
Short names for pages are automatically created based on the page title (rather than the date/time, which was really ugly). This means that users won’t have to think about this anymore. Hooray!
index_html is no more — users can choose whichever page they want to be the “default” page for a folder. I can’t wait not to have to explain that anymore to folks.
Top-level folders are automatically added as site tabs, which is a nice practice. (And can be disabled.)
Single items can be cut/copied/deleted from the object view — no more need to switch over to contents view. Again, a welcome usability tweak.
The downside: Plone 2.1 Alpha 2 is (surprise!) still alpha-quality code, which means it’s definitely not ready for production use yet. There are quite a few bugs left to squash before it goes primetime. Andrew is trying to convince me to go up to the Vancouver sprint and I have to say, this is definitely inspiring me to want to go and try to help.