Dear Plone community,

Here’s a little trial balloon I’d like to float. Potshots welcome.

I’ve been thinking for a while that we need more structured, scalable ways to listen to our worldwide user community. In particular, I think we need better ways to listen to them for feature ideas, and better ways to understand which of the many great ideas out there would be the most valued for our users.

Community-generated “ideas” sites have become very popular in the technology community in the past year; you can see 3 very successful ones in action over at Ubuntu, at Salesforce.com and at Dell.  I think we could get 80% of the bang for 2% of the effort with one simple trick.  Ready?

Let’s install the VotePlugin into the main Plone issue tracker.

As you can see, it’s a simple, unobtrusive plugin that lets logged users register +1/-1 votes for Trac objects.  Even better, you can make Trac reports based on votes, such as Trac’s own report of the most popular tickets.

A few thoughts:

• It would give core developers a better sense of where our community’s pain points really are.
• It would give non-core users a clear, simple way to submit ideas and express support for others’ ideas.  People like to be listened to.
• It helps new contributors figure out where they could have the most impact.
• It would use the proven, existing community collaboration tool that are already working well for us.

• Voting wouldn’t be binding; that is, developers might not fix the most popular tickets first.  But at least it would give core developers some idea of what hurts the most in the community, and that may be useful in helping folks choose where to spend their scarce and valuable time.

One caveat:

• VotePlugin requires Trac 0.11; Plone.org is running Trac 0.10, so we’d have to upgrade.  No idea how much of a PITA this is, but I’m guessing it’s not too bad.

So, whaddya think?

Anybody willing to tackle upgrading Plone’s Trac, installing the VotePlugin, and creating a custom report or two?

We’ve just released Slideshow Folder 4.0, a major upgrade to a product we’ve built to make it easy for folks using Plone to create beautiful animated slideshows in their sites. It’s a “Release Candidate 2″, which means we’ve tested it quite a bit, believe it’s ready for production use, and don’t think it has any bugs.

If you’ve ever wanted to have a slick, animated slideshow in your Plone site just by clicking “make slideshow” on a folder full of images, then Slideshow Folder is for you. Give it a spin, and let us know what you think.