The Plone Newsroom

The unofficial Plone Podcast

TPN-official-landscape.pngA monthly podcast about Plone, the Plone community and whatever we come up with to keep you informed. We will do our best to release a new recording at the beginning of each month.

Brought to you by Philip Bauer and Fred van Dijk

Suggest a topic to us to include in the next episode by sending us an e-mail to one of our first names 'at' plone dot org. We record our podcast with video and audio, you can find links to our episodes on Youtube, but we also provide an audio version on Apple Podcasts and host the audio files on ACast. 


Episode #08 - May 12th2022

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZUQ-9DSVf4 - 1:08 min. Recorded 2022-05-11

Audio only: https://play.acast.com/s/the-plone-newsroom/tpn-episode-8
(or search for Plone in the Apple Podcasts apps)

Topics:

This podcast is all about sprints. Phlip and Fred have both been to the Beethoven sprint at the location in Bonn (2nd location this year was in Bucharest). Topics discussed:

  • sprints in general,
  • our past sprint experiences,
  • what was worked on and achieved by people during the Beethoven sprint
  • The upcoming Plone 6 release but this time zooming in on the included Volto 16 frontend
  • And what is next after Volto 16.

And all this is done with a special guest that graciously agreed to join us the whole recording: Volto release manager Victor Fernandez de Alba.


Episode #07 - April 13rd 2022

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ND68gu56rQ - 1:09 min. Recorded 2022-04-13

Audio only: https://play.acast.com/s/the-plone-newsroom/tpn-episode-7
(or search for Plone in the Acast or Apple Podcasts apps)

Topics:

  • Plone 6 Classic, release since 6.0.0a4
    • Basics, UI Bootstrap 5, ES6, TinyMCE Resource registry
    • Icon resolver, modern image scales, dexterity textindexer
    • plone.base to prevent circular imports, code cleanup
    • Development with ES6 support
      • removed require.js
      • modernized code: es 6 modules and imports
      • mockup is an npm package (like plonetheme.barceloneta)
      • no more resources and bundle resources
      • no more through the web compilation of bundles
      • jQuery still included.
  • Volto 15 development updates:
    • out since mid march, needed to be 15 because of semver & security fix required
    • 4 point releases since then
    • lazy loading: drafs.js.
    • preview image component, Spanish & Basque translations
    • CI/CD documentation goodness: Volto docs are now merged in the upcoming Plone 6 documentation, check https://docs.voltocms.com
    • Quick demo: Volto 15.4 with 6.0a 4 runs fine, map block
  • Current and upcoming events and sprints:
  • Add'ons & Misc:

Episode #06 - February 28th 2022

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ND68gu56rQ - 38 min. Recorded 2022-02-28

Audio only: https://play.acast.com/s/the-plone-newsroom/tpn-episode-6
(or search for Plone in the Acast or Apple Podcasts apps)

Topics:

Episode #05 - January 22th 2022

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcUV1TD34tc - 69 min. Recorded 2022-01-21

Audio only: https://play.acast.com/s/the-plone-newsroom/tpn-episode-5
(or search for Plone in the Acast or Apple Podcasts apps)

Topics:

Notes/remarks after the recording (Fred):

  • So... we talked a lot about page composition tools/add'ons as our feature for this recording. We discussed the history, their properties, design choices, implementation and how that impacts useability. But at the end we ran out of time for this section. Allthough it might seem very spontaneous, we really do some kind of time keeping in a desperate attempt to keep our podcast within 45-60 minutes. :-)

    After the recording I felt we didn't say enough or wrap up about the add'on that ignited our discussion about collective.contentsections. Or you might get the impressions that I don't like it because it stores all tiles/blocks in the default hierarchy just like Products.Collage or other early tools did.  I actually like re-using the main Plone content hierarchy because it is one extra concept less that editors will have to understand about navigation/storage of their content. On the other hand it has it's limitation and editors have to map content hierarchy to a composite page, but nowadays the DOM hieararchy is very recognisable.
    Aso: other tools/add'ons that operate on contenttypes continue to work. collective.cover, mosaic, and also Volto blocks have their own layout definitions stored in fields that are opaque to editors and developers.

    collective.contentsections was so easy to install for a demo (make install, make run after checking out the repo, load demo content with json in the repo) I didn't even really look at the source code, so when Philip asked me how the composite page hooked in the sections I hadn't check yet: the Document/Page CT is modified to be folderish and the sections/row CT's hook into the Page.

    We did some wrapping up by one of us remarking that all these add'ons are (like all add'ons) influenced and designed around the intended target audiences. collective.cover has a very strict separation between layout and edit because when development started government agencies and news agencies were their audience.

    collective.contentsections is (per the README in the repo) created by experienced developers at Imio whose main target audience is a CMS/web platform for municipalities.  Both for prospective editors and also the 'end users' of such web portals the page composition is I think a good match: functional enough but not too distracting. Limited in the possible combinations of content tiles, (and no drag & drop) but also visually clear enough for citizens to scan/navigate municipality website landing pages that you create with it. It takes getting used to any page composition tool.  So for the intended users & viewers It's a great 2022 re-implementation. 

    I consider one of the biggest challenges of my IT job is predicting the future for our clients. If I now choose to either select, already extend an existing add'on or develop a new one, will it still be flexible enough in the future when functional requirements or expectations of the UX change? (keeping up with the Joneses). That's where I have some doubts with using collective.contentsections for generic sites. Once used to the tool editors/clients will demand drag and drop, 1/3-2/3, 1/4-3/4 layouts and more and more variations of the restricted default feature set. These have to be pressed in the existing concept/metaphor of section CT as rows , CT items as tiles with more and more fields properties on those content types, which will eventualy confuse even experienced editors. There composition tools like Mosaic and now Volto are more generic and will be a safer bet for future extendability.

    to wrap up the much too long post wrap:  For each of these page composition tools it is also about adoption and the add'on ecosystem. There are dozens of available tiles for Mosaic and now blocks for the Volto block composition system you can re use.  I see a future here for contentsections: it has been developed from zero on and for Plone 6 which features Bootstrap 5 and ESM javascript. Those are major and important parts of the new 'standard library' that integrators can use in Plone 6 to create add'ons. Add'ons that render their normal views nice and consistent also inside a contentsection like a tile or block, with much less risk of css grid/layout and javascript conflicts.