Politics, the environment, technology, activism. And stuff.
Posted in General on Mar 2nd, 2010
Last June, I wrote up some initial thoughts about how Plone could to more to help folks with limited experience preparing images for the web. It got quite a bit of favorable response, but then I went off on sabbatical and haven’t followed up, until now. I’m more convinced than ever that this is a [...]
Posted in General on Feb 18th, 2010
Shortly before dashing out the door for Pycon 2010, David Glick pushed out a 1.0 release of Popup Forms for Plone, which he and Steve McMahon built on top of Steve’s excellent Pipbox and PloneFormGen products. Popup Forms for Plone makes it point-and-click easy to create timer-driven javascript popup forms anywhere in your Plone site. You [...]
Posted in General on Feb 18th, 2010
Here’s a pattern I’ve observed. Many website design clients, especially those who have never been responsible for a website project before, expect to a process that goes roughly like this: 1) Talk about requirements 2) Do a complete graphic design 3) Fully implement the design in the site 4) Then move on to building out the functional elements [...]
Posted in General on Jan 24th, 2010
Continuing on the theme of quick-and-dirty benchmarking of the forthcoming Plone 4 release, I decided to revisit an experiment I did about a year ago in which I looked at the memory usage on startup of Plone 3 vs. Plone 4. In December 2008, I found that Plone trunk used 36% less memory on startup [...]
Posted in General on Jan 19th, 2010
Plone 4 is about to leave its alpha testing phase and enter beta testing prior to a final release. One of the many things the Plone team has worked really hard on in this release cycle is improving Plone’s performance. Plone core developer Hanno Schlichting has blogged about this a number of times, and deserves [...]
Posted in General on Dec 29th, 2009
Andreas Jung recently wrote “zopyx.trashfinder,” a quick-and-dirty script for assessing whether folks releasing software via the Python community’s “PyPI” repository are providing minimal metadata and actually making releases. (Andreas has been on the warpath against sloppy release management, it seems, perhaps having been recently frustrated.) Andreas has assessed the zope., plone., and collective.* namespaces so far. [...]
Posted in General on Oct 13th, 2009
Joel Burton, Chris Calloway, Chris Ewing and Chris Rossi (with some remote assistance from Alex Clark and Matthew Wilkes) just wrapped up an insanely productive sprint focused on improving ZopeSkel, the code generator for Plone integrators and developers. At the end of their in-depth write-up, they share some golden “lessons learned” about effective small-group sprinting. The [...]
Posted in General on Jul 3rd, 2009
I’m pleased to announce that I’ll be taking a sabbatical from ONE/Northwest, beginning around July 20th and lasting through early November! After 13 years at ONE/Northwest, I’m feeling a little fatigued. Worse, I feel like I’ve become disconnected from the wellspring of inspiration that makes social change work possible. I need to simultaneously unplug and reconnect. I [...]
Posted in General on Jun 29th, 2009
Commenting is the building block of most “social” features on the web. Plone has had commenting since its very early releases, and got a lot of things right the first time. However, the web has become more sophisticated since 2004, and our “mostly good enough” commenting framework is now showing its age. It’s time [...]
Posted in General on Jun 8th, 2009
I’ve been brainstorming a bit about how Plone do an even better job of helping non-technical website editors manage and optimize their images for the web, and I’ve come up with what I think is a pretty clever idea. I have neither the time nor the skill to implement it, and so I thought I’d [...]
Posted in General on Jun 1st, 2009
The Plone community is hard at work on some game-changing innovations that will redefine your notion of what is possible with a content management system. One of the coolest elements of this is Deliverance, a new system for “theming” (applying a custom visual design) to a Plone site. Deliverance introduces the paradigm-shifting notion of “rules based [...]
Posted in General on May 22nd, 2009
Geir Bækholt of Jarn just delivered a keynote talk at the European Plone Symposium 2009 in which he outlined the roadmap for the next two major releases of Plone. You can skim through the slides here, but it’s worthwhile to click through to the full version so you can click on the “Notes” tab and [...]
Posted in General on May 1st, 2009
I just did a little experiment today (prompted by a clever idea from Erik Rose) to see if I could achieve Plone blogging nirvana by mashing together QuillsEnabled and Scrawl. Not only did it work, it made me cackle with such evil genius glee that I needed to write it up. OK, so you’re probably thinking: [...]
Posted in General on May 1st, 2009
Katie Cunningham, a technical lead at NASA, has written up a great three-part case study on her experiences managing a massive (and massively successful) project to relaunch the NASA Science website with Plone. Part I: Why Plone? Part II: Design and Development Part III: Lessons Learned Lots of great lessons in there about what it takes to manage a [...]
I really enjoyed Ian Bicking’s PyCon talk, “Topics of Interest.” Light on substance perhaps, but possibly the best use of a twitter an IRC backchannel ever. Ian is indeed one of those people who is interested in interesting things.
Posted in General on Mar 9th, 2009
Calvin Hendryx-Parker loves the ZODB. As well he should — it’s an amazing database that continues to be waaay ahead of its time. Object databases are great for content management, it’s a shame to see so many folks stuck in SQL-only modes of thinking.
Posted in General on Feb 3rd, 2009
As of this week, and much to my surprise, I’m officially a published author! Along with a dozen other talented Plone community members, I contributed three chapters to Practical Plone 3: A Beginner’s Guide to Building Powerful Websites. A modest contribution the annals of technical nonfiction, to be sure, but I’m still tickled pink at the [...]
Posted in General on Jan 31st, 2009
I’m very excited about Products.TinyMCE, the new add-on product for Plone by Rob Gietema of Four Digits that integrates TinyMCE, the popular open-source graphical HTML, into Plone. Background: Since Plone 2.1, released in 2006, Plone has shipped with an excellent graphical HTML editor called Kupu. Kupu was a mature, capable product long before TinyMCE was a [...]
Posted in General on Jan 20th, 2009
Nathan Van Gheem has put out a 1.0 release candidate of ImageEditor, his fantastic image editing add-on product for Plone. ImageEditor implements a slick, easy-to-use image editor inside of Plone. ImageEditor lets Plone users quickly and easily resize, crop, sharpen and compress images they’ve uploaded without Photoshop.A short screencast is worth a thousand words of [...]
Posted in General on Jan 6th, 2009
The internals of Plone’s user & groups system got massively upgraded in Plone 2.5 with the inclusion of PAS (Plugabble Auth System). Behind the scenes, we now have an impressively powerful, extremely flexible system for managing the entire authentication system. It’s a great foundation. But while the foundation is sound, the more external-facing parts of [...]