Keynote from Plone Conference 2016

1. Plone Futures
Plone Conference 2016

2. It's great to have Plone back here in the US. It's been far too long.
To our international visitors, it's wonderful to have you here and
I'm glad we could get you here for one last visit before the wall
goes up.
Welcome to Boston!

3. Fifteen years

4. This is always the hardest of the "what's coming in Plone" talks to give.
We've spent the last few years talking about what Plone 5 would look
like and how we were progressing towards that. And it was a hugely
sucessful release.
^ Lots of positive attention, Dexterity, Deco.

5. But the .1 release is always the super boring one.
Plone 5.1
The release where we apologize for everything we did to you in
5.0.

6. Prevent over-generation of js/css files (1 of each per add-on).
Allow add-ons to add their resources to “default” (available at
all times) or “logged-in” (only for authenticated users) bundles.
https://github.com/plone/documentation/pull/529/files
Meta bundles
generation

7. (have to check multiple places to see if package is
installed)
Largely unused and an old implementation of OpenID.
Remove it from core, live as add-on.
Get rid of
portal_quickinstaller
• Currently two ways of installing products: GenericSetup and
CMFQuickInstaller
• From a user standpoint, needlessly complicated.
• From developer standpoint, also needlessly complicated
• @@installer
• Only handle GS profiles
• Standardize on "default" and "uninstall" profile names

8. Add actions control panel to Plone. one of the main reasons
people need to go into the ZMI right now.
Portal actions control panel

9. Scale images in plone.scale such that they will look good on devices with pixel ratios greater that 1. More and more
devices these days can display images with higher resolution than the html/css resolution. Plone however often serves
images that are scaled to the exact same size as html/css resolution, while a lot of devices can display twice the
resolution.
Retina image scales

10. Read image EXIF information to automatically rotate them if
necessary.
Auto-Rotation for Images

11. Plone 5.x

12. Add new option to search control panel setting the default
ordering of @@search
Easily change default search order

13. Add installed, not-installed, have, not-have conditions to registry.xml records to control
whether or not theyʼre imported. Particularly useful when it comes to registering
resources in add-ons that target multiple versions of Plone.
conditionally import registry records
• installed
• not-installed
• have
• not-have

14. Merge it into CMFPlone, so there's one less package. Add a new Plone control panel,
so you don't have to go through the ZMI, with a cleaner, more usable interface.
Merge
Products.RedirectionTool
into core
• Merge into CMFPlone
• New control panel

15. Registry Improvements
• Add ability to add/edit/delete records from control panel
• Import/export capability

16. Remove support for old style
resource registries
• Drop use of cssregistry.xml, jsregistry.xml
• Fail loudly, so users know why the old way doesn't work

17. Add ability to require email verification before account is
activated. Particularly important on self-registration-enabled sites.
Merge collective.emailconfirmationregistration into core

18. Assimilate
collective.indexing
• Queued indexing, happens only once per transaction
• Significant performance improvements
• Allows other indexers (like SOLR) to be notified on any indexing
operations

19. Begin removing existing Backbone code, more use of React
instead.
Use React in core, deprecate Backbone

20. Framework Fight!

21. Which I'm pretty sure was written by a spambot, because I
don't understand any of it.
Reset define in RequireJS after bundles are loaded
“Reset the requirejs define global variable in Plone so add-on
developers do not have to learn how to use requirejs if they are
including js that expect requirejs to be used.”

22. Whereas Diazo handles theming -- the entire site
design, Mosaic is focused on just the layout/display of
content
- Create complete page layouts, through the web, by
placing tiles of content the page.
- This can be text, images, specific field values,
collection results, embeddable media.
- Responsive grid, collapse nicely on smaller screens
- Page layouts can be saved and reused, set as default
views for new content.
- And the ability to limit which users can use the which
Mosaic
• Content layout
• "Tiles"

24. <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
xml:lang="en"
lang="en"
data-layout="./@@page-site-layout">

25. <div class="mosaic-grid-row">
<div class="mosaic-grid-cell mosaic-width-half mosaic-position-leftmost">
<div class="movable removable mosaic-tile mosaic-ingredients-tile">
<div class="mosaic-tile-content">
<div data-tile="./@@plone.app.standardtiles.field?field=ingredients"></div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="mosaic-grid-cell mosaic-width-half mosaic-position-half">
<div class="movable removable mosaic-tile mosaic-directions-tile">
<div class="mosaic-tile-content">
<div data-tile="./@@plone.app.standardtiles.field?field=directions"></div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>

26. <div class="mosaic-grid-cell
mosaic-width-half
mosaic-position-half">

27. <div data-tile="./@@plone.app.standardtiles.field?field=directions">

28. Extending this further...
• Using diazo, plone.resource for ttw application development
• Asko: “fat themes”

29. collective.themefragments
^ Shoving more into themes, so that theyʼre no
longer just design, but also functionality
^ Export current site setup as “theme”
^ Do we need to worry about this? Drupal is
notorious for having themes that decide things
like which text editor youʼll be using
Fat Theme
• Theme fragments (Zope PageTemplate files) living in theme
package, rendered as a tile. (collective.themefragments)
• Design + Functionality
• Embed genericsetup profiles in zipped theme packages
(collective.themesitesetup))
• Dexterity content types
• TTW permissions
^ Maybe these aren't just themes,

30. We can also do some pretty amazing stuff with this concept. This is Rapido, you can go
to Eric Brehault's talk to hear more about it. But I guarantee you'll be hearing a lot about
this in the next few years.

31. https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/organizations/
6123238505578496/?sp-page_size=48#6248572219555840
GSOC

32. Vikas Parashar: Themes

33. "Clean Blog"

34. "Spot"

35. "Booster"

36. "Business
Casual"

37. "Future
Imperfect"

38. http://googlingsummer.blogspot.in/2016/08/summarizing-
summer.html
Parker Joshi:
collective.easyforms
• Dexterity-based form creation
• Migrations from PloneFormGen
• Plone 5 compatibitlity

41. http://blog.jensenjiang.com/2016/08/20/GSoC-2016-
product/
Jensen Jiang (ftw.book)
• “proceedings” layout
• Plone 5 support

42. Plone Futures

43. Plone 2020
• APIs (hide complexity)
• REST API (plone.restapi)
• Python API (plone.api)

44. Plone 2020
• Improve TTW customization
• Improve training/documentation

45. Training this week has been huge success, greatly
improved our available training material.
^ Training as vital to bringing in new users/contributors
training.plone.org

46. Plone 2020
• Cleaner codebase
• Simplify structure
• Remove unused functionality/code

47. Alpine City Sprint
^[Zope Resurrection Sprint](https://
blog.gocept.com/2016/10/04/zope-resurrection-
part-2-
First step towards making Plone Python 3
compatbile
^ With Python 2 nearing end-of-life, we need to be
making our way towards Python 3.
^ Interim step for Plone
Zope2 / Update
Dependencies
• Update dependencies to latest versions
• ZTK
• Zope
• ZODB3
• Most are Python 3 compatible
• Minimal cleanup

48. The Headless CMS

49. Content management systems have traditionally
been broken down into three layers
^ Holds and serves the content.
^ The functionality that allows you to add/edit/delete
and otherwise manage the content
^ And the one that provides the visual
representation of that content
So when we use the term "headless", we're talking
about removing that final presentation layer,
creating a clear separation between the front and
back ends of the CMS.
Three layers of CMS
• Content Storage
• Content Management
• Content Presentation

50. Mobile growing into a larger percentage of traffic. Headless positions
plone well for succeeding as things trend in that (mobile) direction.
CMS Front end
• Traditional Web
• Dynamic
• Static
• Mobile
• Native App/Application
• IoT
• Other systems/services

51. Is the CMS the center of
the experience or a part
of the whole?

52. The thing is, the recent
trends have leveled the
playing field. The headless
CMS and microservices
reduce the reliance that
organizations have on
commercial CMSs. It's harder

53. Existing options from other old-school CMS tend to focus
on adding an API and saying "just ignore the frontend"
^ Typically deemed “Decoupled”
The Decoupled CMS
* Existing system + API

54. If that's good enough for us, we're already there.
Yay!
plone.rest provides the basic infrastructure that
allows us to build RESTful endpoints in Plone.
^ plone.restapi integrates that with the existing
Plone functionality
^ In alpha
The Decoupled CMS
• plone.rest
• plone.restapi

55. “Note, however, that many of the traditional products that now offer
headless capabilities were not really architected for these use cases. In
fact, when some of those products were created, multi-channel only
meant delivery to multiple websites. Building these capabilities is only
adding to their complexity.”
--Apoorv Durga

56. So we said, yeah, ok. We're already talking about
simplifying our stack.

57. Three Teams
• REST API
• Front-end
• Works with plone.server or plone 5 + restapi
• Basic plone ui: navigation, toolbar, login/logout
• Handles form generation, read json schema, determine widgets,
• Theme, which can be overridden at build time
• server side rendering via Angular Universal
• views (add/edit/view, or custom)

58. If you want something fun, have an american, fin, and
catalan all try to spell 'aiohttp'
Three Teams
• Back-end
• aiohttp-based HTTP server (asynchronous, handles multiple
concurrent transactions)
• Plone's Dexterity framework (sans views/forms)
• Zope Tool Kit (ZTK)
• ZODB
• Python 3.5+

59. Concurrent development
• Two approaches, in opposite directions:
• Start with everything and remove what we don’t need/want.
• Start with nothing and add back everything we want.

66. When we talk about removing everything, people get a bit freaked out. WE've been around
for 15 years now and we've already removed a lot of old and/or unused functionality. Let's
take a moment to remember those we've left behind and how far we've come.