Planning

From wednesday until sunday we worked on Deco, Tiles and Blocks. We created a lot of tickets in Trac in advance to get an overview of what should be done. The complete list can be found on plone.org. All the tickets were converted to post-it's.

The team

A total amount of 20 people worked in teams on the separate tickets in different areas including design, javascript, front-end and back-end. Twice a day we did a stand-up, one after lunch and one at the end of the day, to see what progress has been made and what tasks still needed to be done.

Completed tasks

A short summary of some of the tasks which have been done:

• Create functional field tiles, which are a mapping of content type fields
• Create a default layout which is used by all views using blocks (the current setup doesn't need the main template anymore!)
• Create a new design for the Deco UI toolbar
• Convert all the settings to use the new functionality of plone.app.registry
• Improve testcoverage of plone.app.standardtiles (now at around 80%-90%)
• Create a global undo manager
• Create an automated testsetup using Hudson
• Convert all the current viewlets/portlets to tiles, including related items, language selector, lock info, keywords, documentbyline, workflow history, rss, login, calendar and many more
• Create the attachment tile
• Create content listing tile
• Create comments tile
• Javascript JSLint and coverage

Final result

The goal for the end of the sprint was to create a fully functional website using Deco, Tiles and Blocks. At the end of the sprint on sunday at 22:00 the website http://decobrewery.com went live being the first ever website using Deco, Tiles and Blocks!

Video's

I have created video's of some of the new functionality which has been created:

News

Custom contenttype

Content listings

Content and media

Pictures

We have created a flickr set of the pictures which have been created during the sprint.

I would like to thank everyone who participated in the sprint and hope to see you all next year at the Living Statues Sprint 2011!

Topics

This sprint will focus on tasks for the upcoming 4.x and 5.x releases. Potential topics include Deco, Blocks and Collections. Suggestions are more than welcome.

Location

The sprint will be held at the Four Digits Office, located in the city centre of Arnhem. We have room for about 30 sprinters. There are a lot of hotels close to the office. If you need any help finding a suitable hotel let us know and we'll gladly assist you.

Living Statues

The sprint will be held during the World Championship for Living Statues, which will take place on August 30th (sunday). The very best national and international living statues will be performing from 13.00 until 17.00 hrs. At the same time, the amateurs will compete for the National Championship. This will take place in the city center of Arnhem at walking distance of the Four Digits office.

At 17.30 the paradewill start. On the square in front of Church Eusebius, all the living statues will give their best for one last time. After that, the nerve-racking award ceremony will start. For the professionals and amateurs there are 4 diplomas in the categories 'content', 'craftsmanship',  'aesthetical sensation' and 'entertainment'. The best amateur will be awarded with the National title. The best professional will be awarded with the Grand Prix d'Arnhem and may be addressed as the World Champion Living Statues for a year.

About Arnhem

Arnhem has been one of the most attractive shopping areas in the Netherlands for years, boasting a range of large chain stores and little clothes shops. Arnhem has something for everyone, a number of well-known labels and designers such as G-sus, Humanoid, Viktor & Rolf and People of the Labyrinths have turned Arnhem into an attractive town for those with a passion for fashion.

Restored to their former glory and joined underneath one of the shopping streets, the 40 medieval cellars show you what underground Arnhem used to look like. The history of the town is reflected in the town centre itself as well as in 100-year-old Sonsbeek park, where you can take a rest in the heart of the town! The Church of Eusebius dominates the skyline. This late Gothic ogive basilica boasts a unique glass lift, rising to 73 metres and offering you a view of the attractive shopping centre. On your way up you will also see the biggest carillon in Europe!

The town also boasts a wide and varied range of museums - including ones on art, water, wine and history - as well as major attractions such as Burgers' Zoo and the Dutch Open Air Museum. Your day, evening or weekend in Arnhem should not end until you have been to Korenmarkt, the bustling entertainment centre. So whether you like shopping or going out, walking or cycling, visiting attractions or simply prefer more energetic pursuits, Arnhem is the place to be for an unforgettable stay!

Travel

By train

The Four Digits Office is located within walking distance of the Central Railway Station of Arnhem. Both national and international (ICE from Germany) trains will stop at this station.

By plane

The closest airport is Weeze (Dusseldorf), Germany. A direct busservice will take you from Weeze airport to Arnhem Central Station. An other option is to fly to Amsterdam or Eindhoven and take the train from there (1.5 hour train journey).

Contact

If you would like to come, please let us know. Contact us about the sprint at: livingstatuessprint@fourdigits.nl

Image courtesy Lars Smook and Frodo Jansen.

Looking back at the last couple of years we have been contributing a lot to the Open Source Community in general and Plone in specific. This includes Plone core-developement, add-on products development, dutch translations, visiting and giving talks at conferences and symposia. These contributions are made both during and after work hours. Up until now we encouraged coworkers to contribute but everybody could decide him/herself if he/she wanted to do so, nothing formal was agreed.

Following Google and Jarn who have similar agreements, every Four Digits employee should now devote 10% of his or her time to improve Plone! We believe by doing this we can make Plone even better and hope other companies will also consider similar agreements with their employees.

After Alexander Limi showed me some demo's of the drag and drop upload functionality added in the new beta versions of Firefox 3.6 I just had to try to add it to the Deco UI. The demo's used a fixed area where images can be dropped. In Deco you want to specify exactly where you want the images to be and not an area. To determine where to drop images Deco uses the mousemove event, but this event is not available when the window doesn't have focus (like with dragging images into a browser) so some code needed to be rewritten to use the dragover event.

Another issue was the fact the demo's use the sendAsBinary method of the XMLHttpRequest object. This method only sends the binary data itself and adding other fields like filename is not possible. I fixed this issue by creating a form request in javascript so I can add multiple fields like filename etc. All the sourcecode can be found in the Plone SVN.

This demo shows a Finder window on the left with some pictures taken at the Plone Conference 2009 and the Deco UI on the right with some example text. First a single image is dragged into the browser. The image is put on the dropped location and a black mask and loading icon is added to the image. The image is now being uploaded to the server and once ready the server returns the url and some more properties in a json structure. The correct source url is then applied to the image object.

Multiple files is also supported. Each image will be uploaded to Plone and becomes a sepparate tile. After the images are uploaded the images can be rearanged using the standard drag and drop functionality of Deco.

Sorrento

At the European Plone Symposium in Sorrento (Italy) we organized a Birds of a Feather session about how to improve collections, contentlistings and search. Among the participants were Geir Baekholt, Carsten Senger and our complete team. Laurens organized the BOF session using his Plone UI research document as input.

PLIP's

The outcome of the BOF sessions lead to five PLIP's:

• PLIP 9295 Improved UI for collections
• PLIP 9283 A more lightweight backend for collections
• PLIP 9352 Combination of search results PLIPs (merge of 9271 and 9282)
• PLIP 9327 Unified interface for lists of content
• PLIP 9321 Reimplement the search form with an eye on usability

Carsten took up PLIP 9321 which left us four plips to complete.

Sprint

Since the four PLIPs had a lot of overlap we decided to team up with Jarn and complete them all at once. On thursday morning we had a brainstorm session to determine what we already had and which direction to go. Geir already had a working package for plone.app.contentlisting for PLIP 9327 and we had done some work on the search results PLIP. After the brainstorm session we came up with a design using three packages:

• plone.app.contentlisting to create the unified interface of the content listings
• plone.app.search to contain all the search related functionality
• plone.app.collection to contain the Collection content type

Backend

Ralph, Roel and Geir worked on the backend. They used the :records mechanism of Zope to parse the query string. One query line consists of an index (query.i:records), an operator (query.o:records) and a value (query.v:records or query.v:records:list if it was a multiple input field). This query string was converted to a catalog query to get the actual search results.

Roel, Ralph and Geir working on the backend

User interface

Laurens, Denys and I worked on the user interface. We used the design from the PLIP and created a static HTML prototype to see if the design we came up with actually worked. Once we agreed this was the right way to go, we continued to build the query builder using the code from the backend team.

Laurens, Denys and me working on the UI

Collection type

Once we got the query parser and the query builder done, it was time to glue everything together and store the query on the collection type. We worked throughout the weekend to get everything done just before the plip deadline. Ralph and Roel created the Collection type and Laurens and I finished the query builder and put the query builder into the criterion edit form of the new Collection type.

Finishing the collection type while enjoying the nice view.

Final result

Below is a screenshot of the javascript version of the query builder. The first column shows all the available indexes, the second the operator and the third the value. To keep every rule one line we used pulldown menu's for multi selects. The fourth column has a remove criteria button and finally the fifth column shows the remaining matching items after this rule was applied. This provides instant feedback of the number of results per rule, so when there are no results you can see right away wich rule caused this. Below the criteria you can select the sorting order and below that you can see a live search of the matching elements of your query.

Non javascript fallback

The interface also has a non-javascript fallback which looks almost the same. See image below:

Non-javascript fallback interface

Folder summary

After saving the query you can select view methods for the collection. These methods use the plone.app.contentlisting package build by Geir.

Summary view of the collection

Thanks go out to Jarn for providing the sprint location and we hope the framework team is as excited about the end-result as we are!

This new version contains a lot of fixes, some of the highlights are:

• Upgrade steps and uninstall profile added.
• Definition lists added.
• Upgrade to TinyMCE 3.5.2.
• Improved handling of inserting images (all credits to the balloon sprint team!).

A full list of all the changes can be found in the changelog

Plone 4

This version also adds support for the upcoming Plone 4. This PLIP which proposes TinyMCE to become the default WYSIWYG editor has been approved by the framework team and is ready for review.

I18n

All the control panel messages are also translatable in this version, so anybody who is interested in creating translations please feel free to add them in svn. English and Dutch are already available at this moment.

On Wednesday I gave a talk about the progress we have made so far, showing a prototype of the layout and content editing part. Integration with the Plone UI, Dexterity Content Types and the new rendering process called Blocks was covered as well. A video of the presentation can be found  on Plone.tv and the slides can be found on Slideshare.

On Friday and Saturday Deco was one of the sprint topics. New features were implemented and bugs have been fixed. A complete list of all the work which has been done can be found on Open Plans. If you would like to test Deco you can find the installation instruction the Plone SVN. Feedback about usability and  implementation is very much appreciated. Help implementing Deco is also greatly appreciated, just sent me an e-mail if you want to help out.

For a website we were building we were looking for solution to insert an address within the content of a page. This address needed to be selected from a database so when the address itself changed, it was automatically updated within the content of the webpage. This functionality is often called a placeholder. To be able to build this functionality we had to make a plugin for the wysiwyg editor.

After having a closer look at Kupu we came to the conclusion it is possible to create a plugin for Kupu but, it is really hard to separate your plugin code from the Kupu codebase. The last thing we want is to edit the source of another product since this will most likely create issues when upgrading to a newer version of Kupu. We also had a look at the FCKEditor plugin for Plone but this editor also isn't very plugin friendly.

When examining the TinyMCE codebase we noticed TinyMCE is by itself already fully based on modules. This made it really easy to create a separate TinyMCE plugin in another Plone product. The only problem at the time was that, as stated above, the development of TinyMCE was put on halt. That is why we decided to upgrade the product ourself to the newest version of TinyMCE and Plone. After that we also added a control panel to make it easier to configure the editor.

At the moment we are working on the placeholder product for TinyMCE which should be done this summer.