Zidanca sprint 2014: Strategic Plone 5 sprint

This blog post is way overdue, but with the first Plone 5 beta (which this site is currently running on, btw.) released recently I think it's still useful to publish a report on a sprint, which was one of the important stepping stones.

Last summer Termitnjak organized Zidanca sprint 2014, a Plone sprint in beautiful south-east region of Slovenia, focusing on bringing Plone 5 closer to a stable release. The Plone Foundation designated the sprint as a strategic sprint, helping us attract some of the key Plone developers and cover the travel costs for sprinters from distant locations.

The work

The sprint officially started on Saturday 9th of August with a kick-off meeting, where also a number of remote sprinters joined via live stream. After the initial planning discussion we divided into groups and immediatelly started working on different topics.

The front-end team was focusing on the following tasks:

• New resource registry to improve managing of static resources (CSS, Javascript)
• Plone 5 Barceloneta theme: merge Albert Casado's work from Google Summer of Code, various other fixes
• Plone Mockup, the way of modernizing Plone's JavaScript story. Plan was to work on bug and various other fixes.

The back-end team was focusing on migrating and modernising features to be up to date with latest Plone standards, specifically moving control panels to z3c.forms.

Results

I am very happy to report that the sprint was a huge succes! A lot of work has been done, bringing Plone 5 closer to a stable release.

Ramon Navarro Bosch, Rob Gietema and Nathan Van Gheem did amazing work with the new resource registry, integrating all the Mockup work that has been done and adding support for all the modern front-end tools like RequireJS, Less, Grunt, Bower etc. The new registry enables users to use RequireJS and Less and also modify default Plone patterns (aka front-end components) through the web. More information about the new resource registry, how to update your javascript for Plone 5 and more can be found on Nathan Van Gheem's blog:

• https://www.nathanvangheem.com/news/plone-5-resource-registries
• https://www.nathanvangheem.com/news/updating-javascript-for-plone-5
• https://www.nathanvangheem.com/news/customizing-javascript-pattern-options-in-plone-5

Remote Barceloneta team lead by Albert Casado and Víctor Fernández de Alba integrated Albert's impressive work on Plone 5 UI, done as part of Google Summer of Code and various fixes to the theme.

Mockup team was also very productive - Johannes Ragam did various fixes and cleanup tasks and added a new pattern for editing events, Blaž Bratanič added i18n support to all the mockup patterns, while Peter Lamut and Natan Žabkar added a Yeoman generator so it easier to create new patterns. Natan also converted the edit toolbar code to a pattern, so it is compatible with the newest practices.

Vanč Levstik, Dylan Jay, Timo Stollenwerk and myself worked on control panel migrations. The types control panel was successfully migrated and there was significant progress done on the other panels. Also various test and other cleanup tasks were performed.

Florian Friesdorf was working on improving LDAP. While not directly related to Plone 5, this work is really important to improve performance with huge LDAPs.

I hope I've listed all contributions, if I missed someone/something, please let me know.

Relaxation

Of course, working all the time is not very healthy. The pool was a big hit to keep us cool in the afternoon with some of us firing up the sauna in the evening.

Florian and Sibylle, both certified Yoga instructors, held daily Yoga classes to help us stretch out from being hunched in front of our computers for so many hours at a time.

We also organised a wine cellar visit for those that wanted to join, went for a run a few times and took a short hike to one of the nearby hills. Add in a few home-made ice creams and even a cake and we can be sure everyone enjoyed themselves. 

Participants

Many people put a lot of work into making sure the sprint was a success, be it with coding, helping out with organisation or driving people from and to the airport as needed. A big thank you to all!

• Blaž Bratanič
• Jure Cerjak
• Florian Friesforf
• Rob Gietema
• Nathan Van Gheem
• Tadej Justin
• Domen Kožar
• Sibylle Kudla
• Peter Lamut
• Vanč Levstik
• Ramon Navarro Bosch
• Gabrijel Peršin
• Johannes Raggam
• Saba Resnik
• Nejc Zupan
• Natan Žabkar
• Maša Žnidaršič
• + all the remote sprinters!

Sponsors

Of course, the sprint would not be possible without sponsors. Their willingness to help us out financially together with enough sleeping spaces on location meant that the Sprint was completely free of charge.

We sincerely thank all the sponsors and hope this will stay the norm for the next sprints we organise too.

• Plone
• enquos
• Sipro inženiring
• Four Digits
• Elmont

Wrap up

Zidanca sprint 2014 was a great success: the spirits were high and a lot of important work on Plone 5 was done, including the awesome new resource registry. If you haven't been on a sprint or organised one, I can highly recommend it, it's a very rewarding experience . It's also a good way to connect with the Plone community and learn more about Plone development, or Plone in general.

Currently there is a lot of polishing work being done on Plone 5 to squash all the remaining bugs and implement smaller features. If you are a developer and would like to contribute, head over to https://docs.plone.org/develop/plone-coredev/index.html to get you started. If you are a Plone user, you can install latest Plone using buildout or wait for the official installers (which should be available soon), and report if you find any issues on the issue tracker. You can also join World Plone Day events and help us get stable Plone 5 out the door as soon as possible.

So we are getting closer, every day closer! See you in Bucharest on Plone conference 2015, if not sooner!