Zope

SEPTEMBER 1, 2010 — The Plone community has raised the bar in the Content Management System market with today's release of Plone 4, a faster, more user-friendly and more refined version of a product which has set the pace for CMS innovation for ... [More] nearly a decade.  Plone 4 delivers big improvements in raw speed, scalability and ease of use, and continues to advance its hallmark strengths of unmatched security, superior user interface, ease of installation and a beautiful out-of-the-box experience. "Plone 4 is based on the most-frequently requested features and improvements from Plone's worldwide user and developer community," says Plone co-founder and Firefox User Experience Lead Alexander Limi. “Our developers and users asked for better performance — Plone 4 is much faster, requires less memory, and performs well even when serving up massive files. They also didn't want us to sacrifice what we do well to get there — and we haven't. Plone 4 is not just more powerful — it continues to improve in areas Plone has always been known for: usability, security, and a CMS that is easy to install, upgrade, and looks great right out of the box.”Looking back on the nine year evolution of Plone and the community that supports it, Limi is more than pleased. “It's gotten to be a lot bigger than I thought it could be. Sometimes we forget how many people are involved with Plone, and how many people have left behind PHP and Java to create successful businesses based around Plone.”Geir Bækholt, President of the Plone Foundation, has a similar reaction. "I'm impressed with how professional, mature and focused the Plone community is. It's rare in open source to see so many companies operating to such high standards, treating their customers and employees well and running their businesses in a sustainable manner.  The best thing about Plone is that we have so many mature, stable companies using it who are consummate professionals at what they do."For all its technical and visual improvements, one of Plone 4's most important roles is to build the under-the-hood foundation even more exciting improvements in Plone 5.  It gives developers and users innovations they can use today, while allowing them to develop products and websites that will be ready to take full advantage of future Plone releases.The list of notable changes in Plone 4 includes: Significant performance improvementsNew themeSearch and indexing improvementsGroup Dashboards for a Customized User ExperienceMassively improved handling of large files & mediaNew, faster folder implementationMore powerful management of users and groupsDynamic forms framework based on jQuery ToolsImproved first-run experienceSmooth upgrade experienceReduced memory footprintUpgraded infrastructure You can find out more about these new features than you would ever want to by visiting http://plone.org/4. Plone 4 is available today at plone.org as a free, open source download, with installers for most major operating systems — including Windows, Mac, Linux and many flavors of UNIX. About Plone Plone is among the top 2% of all open source projects worldwide, with 340 core developers and more than 300 solution providers in 57 countries. The project has been actively developed since 2001, is available in more than 40 languages, and has the best security track record of any major content management system. It is owned by the Plone Foundation, a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization. For more information, visit http://plone.org Press Contacts Europe Geir BækholtPresident, Plone FoundationTønsberg, [email protected] North America Alexander LimiCo-founder of PloneSan Francisco, CA (USA)[email protected] South America Roberto AllendeMember, Plone Foundation Board of DirectorsCordoba, [email protected] Requests for interviews, additional images and information: Mark CorumPlone Marketing Team [email protected] Resources High-resolution PNG screenshot of Plone 4 [Less]

Due to many requests we are extending the talk submission deadline for Plone Conference 2010 in Bristol, UK until the 5th September. So don't delay, get you talk submission in by the end of this week. Once the deadline is reached, the talks will be ... [More] put up for public vote as we only have around 50 speaking slots (which have almost been filled already!). One of the fantastic things about Plone is the wide ranging community that covers developers, designers, integrators, users, and many more. To this end, we always like to see talk submissions from people who might not yet feel a core part of the Plone community. Plone is used in a wide variety of places, and case studies of how it is used in organisations and how Plone has helped changed your organisation are very valuable. If you are stuck for ideas on things to talk about, Steve McMahon wrote a great blog post recently on some ideas for talks. So to submit your talk, head over to the talk submission page and fill in your details. Accepted speakers will be eligible for a reduced conference fee of just £150 (+VAT). See you all in Bristol! [Less]

Two and a half years ago I left my home country Germany to start a new adventure. I made my Plone hobby into a professional career choice and at the same time left to the Norwegian wilderness to work with all the talented people at Jarn.Much has ... [More] happened during that time. Our little company started with three employees and will soon have grown to thirteen and a half in multiple locations. We moved into new custom built office premises in 2008 and are now looking into extending those to meet our growing needs.I had the pleasure of traveling the world, spending four months in Copenhagen and working on interesting and challenging projects during all that time. Plone itself has come a long way too, culminating in the marvelous Plone 4 release yesterday. I had some concern that spending my time on Plone during the workday would make it less interesting to work on it during my free time. But I'm happy this hasn't come true, I'm as interested in contributing to Plone as I was before - even though I shifted my focus more and more to the infrastructure side and am now spending a good deal of my time in Zope 2 and the Zope Toolkit.But with all those good things, I still didn't feel happy all the way. I had to realize that I was neither made for dark Norwegian winters nor small town life. Coming from a buzzing multi-million city myself, there was something missing.Luckily Jarn has established an unofficial presence in Berlin, Germany for some time now, so there was an easy way out for me. As of yesterday I moved to Berlin and will continue to work for Jarn from the new location.Looking back I wouldn't want to miss those years and it's certainly been the right choice for me. Living abroad for a while is a wonderful experience and teaches you many things about yourself, your home country and many more different perspectives onto the world.And now I'm looking forward to the next years and Plone 5 at the horizon :)HannoP.S. As a Social 2.0 opt-out I have neither Facebook or Twitter accounts. If you are not interested in my personal notes, you don't have to follow posts labelled "personal" on this blog ;) [Less]

I was pleasantly surprised this week to are a new release of Zsyncer come out. This is a Zope 2 product I wrote almost ten years ago whilst at ActiveState. It allows you to sync data from one Zope instance to another over XML-RPC. The product was ... [More] taken over by Paul Winkler and now Chris Withers. I'm betting that by now very little of the original code remains and it's vastly improved. But I find it very satisfying to see thata code written ten years ago is still being maintained and used. Especially since the original developer and the original client stopped using it long ago. Another project is the Definitive Guide to Plone which I published under a creative commons license. The second edition of the book was taken on by Redomino and they did an excellent job. Of course compared to many this is small change, others have bigger projects that get picked up. But since I have moved completely away from these fields I still find it satisfying. There might be something to this open source thing. This is also my first post typing in a pile if HTML into my Nexus One - won't be doing that again. [Less]

I went for one day to the Living Statues Sprint in Arnhem, The Netherlands, hosted by Four Digits. I saw lots of new things: plone.app.collections: much more lightweight way to do Collections in Plone, probably included by default in Plone 4.1. ... [More] plone.app.contentlisting: small package that should make it easier to have a listing of either brains or content items, making the standard Plone templates that do these listings much smaller. plone.app.standardtiles: package that implements lots of small bits and pieces of content that are already in Plone, but now in a more general way. They partly are like portlets, partly viewlets. These tiles (for example a content listing tile, which I worked on with Ralph) can be added to the layout of dexterity content types. It is a really flexible way of adding small pieces of html to your page. It is experimental for Plone 4; probably this will be how Plone 5 will work, using the Deco grid system. Nice to have a look at the future of Plone. But first Plone 4.0, which should be out real soon now. [Less]

Plone Cono Sur invites you to attend and show your Plone skills at the second edition of the Plone Symposium South America to be held in Cordoba, Argentina. Plone Symposium South America is a regional event created to gather Plone users from ... [More] Government, Education, NGO and Private Sector. We also strengthen the Plone Community in South America, socially and technically, through training and sprints. Promote Plone locally through the half-day Success Stories session. [Less]

Hi All, Rolling on with more releases :-) SimpleUserFolder is a scriptable, subclassable, fully documented and tested user folder implementation. This release features: - Repackaged as a python package with Sphinx docs - Targets Zope 2.12+ - ... [More] Sphinx-ified docs For more information, please see: http://www.simplistix.co.uk/software/zope/simpleuserfolder cheers, Chris [Less]

Hi All, I'm relieved(!) to announce the release of ZSyncer 1.0.0. This is the first release I've made and I hope no-one is upset about the work I've done (Paul Winkler, you still around?). The big changes: - now a normal python package - Zope ... [More] 2.12+ compatible - docs have been Sphinx-ified The results are as follows: New home for ZSyncer: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/Products.ZSyncer Subversion source repository: https://secure.simplistix.co.uk/svn/ZSyncer/ Documentation: http://packages.python.org/Products.ZSyncer/ Full change log: http://packages.python.org/Products.ZSyncer/changes.html I hope this is of use to people other than me, lemme know if you find any problems, particularly if you have patches that fix them and incldue unit tests ;-) cheers, Chris [Less]

Some members of the community may not be aware of the Python Job Board, a free list of open positions using Python and related tools. You'll find career opportunities working with Django, Plone, SqlAlchemy, CSS, HTML, Database Administration, and ... [More] much more. Although the jobs are in a variety of industries, and located all over the world, the common thread that ties them all together is Python. Are you hiring? Listing an open position on the job board is free. If you have a Python-related job opening, email [email protected] with your information. Be sure to check out the current listings to get a feel for how you should write yours and follow the provided reStructuredText template. Volunteer Maintainers The job board is maintained by the Python.org web team, including Martin Thomas who took over as the primary maintainer from Peter Kropf over 4 years ago. According to Martin, new job listings come in at a rate of anywhere between one a week to ten per day! In the near future, Martin is planning to add a Twitter feed so you can get your job listing fix in real time. We'll have more information about that when the feed is active. [Less]

Summary: yep, we (Nelen & Schuurmans) need a new Python/Django programmer! Location: Utrecht, the Netherlands, right in the center of town. The work subject? Geodjango and water management: that's the shortest summary. Five months ... [More] ago I wrote about an upcoming job opening. We got, if I remember correctly, nine reactions, eight of which mentioned "yeah, I saw on Reinout's blog/twitter...". The power of twitter and blogs wasn't demonstrated that vividly to my colleages yet :-) The end effect was that when we invited people to come round for a talk, they were introduced internally as "oh, some of Reinout's friends are coming"... That meant I had some explaining to do during lunch :-) Business is booming and there's yet another big project coming our way. Help! We really need to crank up the output. At the moment we're three people doing the practical day-to-day Django coding with another one coming up in a week. Cooperative, productive, friendly. We could really use another pair of hands (and a brain, of course). Django experience? Not needed per se, Django is friendly and modular enough that we can teach you. But on the other hand, we really want to get cracking turning out new websites! Bonus points if you're any good in html/css/javascript. If I tell former colleague (and css wizard) Mirella that I'm now the local number one css expert, she'll probably laugh out loud. I'm not bad at all, but a bit of extra knowledge won't hurt. That reminds me: I've got to interrogate our new colleague on his level of css knowledge... We want good software. As an illustration, I've set up a Hudson continuous integration server to monitor the tests, code coverage and the pep8/pyflakes score. We really need to get our act together to get our code coverage up to percentages that I dare mention here. Packaging, automation, buildout, hudson, deployment: we've got that one right. Lots of automation. Buildout helps a lot. Repeatable. Deployments are boring (as they should be) as they're mostly flawless. Windows experience would be helpful as we sometimes need to deploy on windows. In practice all three (and soon four) of us Django programmers are on Ubuntu. The timeframe? What I heard is a closing date of 23 September. But we might start inviting people over sooner as there really are a couple of projects lining up. So don't wait too long. The official stuff? The official vacature is on our website. Yep, that's in Dutch. I'm afraid that speaking Dutch is handiest to get settled into the company. We might be open for an experiment, though :-) You can always mail me if you've got further questions, of course. [Less]