Fair warning: I’ve tested each of these products in a Plone 4.1.5 development instance, but I’ve not deployed any in production or reviewed the code.  All are written by experienced Plone community members, though, so they should be at least reasonable sane.  I’d love to hear about your experiences with any of them.

collective.folderorder - Jens Klein and BlueDynamics Alliance

http://pypi.python.org/pypi/collective.folderorder/1.2

Plone’s default folder view shows items in the order they were added, and while you can manually rearrange items, there’s no way to automatically resort items in a folder view.  (Although you can add a collection as the default view of a folder, this is not always obvious to new users, and quite a few clicks.)  With collective.folderorder, you get a new “Order” option the Actions menu for a folder, and you can easily choose from several default folder ordering schemes, including: reverse order, unordered, and partial ordering. Even better, it provides an easy way for developers to add new ordering schemes.

I’d love to see this one PLIPed for future inclusion in Plone, possibly with a few more ordering options (e.g. last modified, creation date). It’s a small but welcome UI affordance.

collective.folderposition – Laurence Rowe

http://pypi.python.org/pypi/collective.folderposition/1.0

Another small but welcome improvement to folder ordering.  This one adds a nice little set of buttons below a folder listing that allows you to move items instantly to the top, the bottom or up/down a designated number of slots. Again, super convenient when you need to rearrange a lot of folder items.

collective.prettydate – Franco Pellegrini  & Héctor Velarde

http://plone.org/products/collective.prettydate

collective.prettydate reformats the display absolute dates/times (e.g. 3/1/2012) to relative date (e.g. one month ago, four days ago, etc.)  This is really nice for news sites or sites with upcoming events.

collective.embedly – Quintagroup

http://plone.org/products/collective.embedly

collective.embedly makes it stupidly simple to embed almost any externally hosted multimedia (YouTube, Vimeo, Slideshare.net, etc.) into Plone.  It uses the fantastic service “Embedly” which is itself built on the open “oembed” standard.    Developers who want a bit more power may also want to look at collective.oembed.

collective.routes – Nathan Van Gheem

http://plone.org/products/collective.routes

This one is a bit conceptual, but pretty awesome.  From the prolific and talented Nathan Van Gheem comes collective.routes, which makes it possible to build URLs in Plone that do catalog queries, e.g. http://mysite.com/blog/date/of/blog/post.  This isn’t really an end-user product, but it makes it easy for integrators to build really nice URLs for their custom Plone apps.

Chameleon is a lightning fast drop-in replacement for the Zope Page Template system that Plone (and other Python applications) use.  By simply adding Chameleon to your Plone 4 buildout, you can immediately speed up your site by 20% or more, with zero code changes.

The homepage of a stock Plone 4.1rc3 instance yields 13.23 pages/sec on my laptop test environment[1].  With Chameleon added to the buildout, it jumps to 15.94 pages/sec.  That’s a 15% increase.  Not too shabby!  In the real world, where your page templates are doing considerably more work, you should see an even bigger boost.

Malthe’s been brewing this up for a while now, and it’s great to see it cross over into “ready for everyday production use.”  Give it a try!  Malthe’s taking bug reports if you run into any hiccups.

[1] 2GHz MacBook, 2GB RAM, Plone 4.1rc3 via svn, no proxy caching.  ab -n 20 -c 3, average of 10 runs

The staff at Cook Inkeeper dreamed up this “engagement superpower” in the course of living and working in, on and around the waters of Cook Inlet.  In Alaska, the weather is big, just like everything else.  And so are the tides.  And while there’s a ton of information about the weather and tides available online, it’s pretty scattered across different sites, and there’s no “single source” that pulls together all of the “must have” information for Cook Inlet residents.  That’s where we came in.

Inletkeeper staffer Michael Sharp, himself an avid sailor and surfer (when he’s not rocking campaign & communications strategy), identified the various sources for terrestrial and marine weather forecasts and current conditions data, and showed us a really cool iPhone app for generating tide predictions.   We took a look at the data sources–yep, all easy-to-parse RSS and XML.  And even better, it turned out that the tide prediction software underneath the iPhone app was open-source!

A few hours of development time later, my colleagues Matt Yoder and Ryan Foster had a slick, open-source and open-data powered “Weather and Tides” page for the new inletkeeper.org.  Then Cook Inletkeeper asked “Hey, can you make it work great on the iPhone, too?”  Matt got his mobile-fu on, and managed to “mobilize” the page with a few clever bits of CSS and Javascript.  No custom app required, this is all straight-up HTML.  I particularly like the way you can “swipe” to move between panels.  It’s hard to tell this isn’t a native iPhone app.

A few other nice details we managed to work in:

• The tide graph also includes a perpetual tide table, formatted to look just like Cook Inletkeeeper’s popular print tide tables booklet.
• Cook Inletkeeper staff can point-and-click to edit the list of weather and tide stations shown.
• The page uses cookies to automatically remember your customized settings.
• Cook Inletkeeper staff can automatically “hot-link” to custom settings, great for customized email marketing outreach.
• “Recommend on Facebook” button

One of the things I will miss most about Groundwire is the thrill of being able to help conceive and create fun, effective tools like that help environmental groups engage their audiences.

• Real-time simultaneous document editing (that’s right, just like Google Docs!)
• Instant messaging/status updates between Plone users (think Twitter or Yammer)

Yiorgis has a great little video that shows this in action. Pretty magical.

In addition to the obvious function of providing a quick and easy way to track how many pieces of content you’ve got in your site, being able to quickly click through any number to get a list of the matching content objects is a tremendous simple way for site managers to zero in on draft content that might have gotten abandoned before being published, or old, retracted content that is ripe for deletion.

We’re already using it on Groundwire.org, and I’m looking forward to rolling it out to Groundwire clients.  Thanks, Raphael!

I can’t wait to see what folks will be able to accomplish with Diazo.

Cascadia Center for Sustainable Design & Construction — the greenest commercial building in the world, currently in planning by our friends at the Bullitt Foundation.

Mountains to Sound Greenway Trust – leading and inspiring action to conserve and enhance the landscape from Seattle across the Cascade Mountains to Central Washington, ensuring a long-term balance between people and nature.

Harvesting Clean Energy –  a program of Climate Solutions, that helps accelerate rural economic development in the Northwest through clean energy development.

It’s great to be able to work with folks getting the good work done.

I’ll be starting a Masters in Public Administration at the University of Washington’s Evans School of Public Affairs this September.  I’ll wrap up my work at Groundwire in June and take the summer off to be a full-time dad to Everett and to enjoy summer in Seattle through the eyes of a fifteen-month-old.

I’ve been unbelievably fortunate to be a part of Groundwire over the past decade and a half.  I’ve learned a ton, worked for hundreds of amazing, inspiring environmental organizations and have been blessed with the most kick-ass colleagues and co-conspirators this side of anywhere.  I am more grateful to all of you (past and present) than I can ever adequately express.  Thank you.

I won’t be going too far away.  We’re staying here in Seattle.  I’ll continue to serve on the boards of the Plone Foundation and Green Media Toolshed.  It’s possible I’ll add a consulting gig or two to my plate once I get a handle on my academic workload.

While there’s no denying that this feels like the end of a huge chapter in my life, it also feels like a new beginning.  I’m really excited to plunge into the unknown and into what I hope will be a period of creative uncertainty.  While I don’t know what the next chapters looks like, I’m confident that they will remix familiar themes: public service, social change, openness, systems thinking, data-driven decision-making and smart use of technology.

Watch this space for further updates.  Be seeing you.