Rapture (PSE 2011) Sprint Report

Sprinters at the Plone Symposium East’s “Rapture” sprint learned that heaven is high bandwidth, big monitors and lots of Plone collaboration. Thanks to our hosts, the WebLion group at Penn State for loaning us their office, great wifi, projectors, big monitors and advice on food and coffee.

We had a lot of sprinters, possibly a record for an event other than a Plone Conference, and we broke up into several groups. Thanks to group leaders for the report out information below!

Connexions / Rhaptos

We were enthusiastic to meet and collaborate with the Connections/Rhaptos folks, who are using Plone to build the world's largest collection of open-license course materials. They led sprints on:

Connexions Rhaptos API: Built an AtomPub import mechanism. At the end of the sprint, this was working both for new content and edits. More details in Kathi Fletcher’s Blog.

Connexions Rhaptos Plone Update: working on updating Rhaptos/Connexions from Plone 2.5. Ross, Michael Mulich

Form Widgets Group

A form widgets team made use of the domain-expertise of Matt Barkau and Joe DeLuca to work on accessibility issues in Archetypes and Dexterity widgets. The team corrected several annoyances that particularly hurt screen reader users, carefully researching the best accessibility practices for each solution..

Hugo and SteveM worked on the Dexterity datetime form widget (collective.z3cform.datetime). Michael Miller (UCLA) worked on compiling a visual guide to Archetypes and Dexterity widgets that may become part of the Dexterity documentation.

ZopeSkel

Cris Ewing led a ZopeSkel sprint. Cris reports that “Our goal was to move forward on refactoring ZopeSkel into a series of smaller, lighter packages in the 'templer' namespace. Beyond that there were also a number of improvements needed in the core package, and a few long-standing bugs that needed fixing.”

Participating in the ZopeSkel work were Lazaro Clapp, Ricardo Newbery, Josh Johnson, David Ray and Cris.

Completed

• Added templer.zope, templer.plone, templer.plonecore, templer.plonebuildout, and templer.silva packages
• ported plone3_buildout, plone4_buildout, and silva_buildout templates
• partially completed porting basic_zope, plone and archetype templates
• fixed a long-standing bug in the recipe template doctest involving a test within a buildout within a test (the source of Ploneception)
• refactored the handling of structures so that any question defined by a template can add new structures to the template (which allows us to maintain common pieces of code in a single place)

Plone.Edu Installer

Kim Nguyen and helpers worked on creating installers for Plone using a Plone.Edu stack. Kim learned the layout of the Unified and OS X installers and also worked on virtual machine installers.

Plone 2011 Conference Theming

Chrissy, Trish, Tyler, Mark Corum and Rob Porter led a small army working on the Plone Conference 2011 Website. Thanks to Trish for the report out:

• Implemented backstretch.js to make sure the background image is always 100%
• Set up webfonts as a browser resource
• Implementing responsive.css
• Set up jQuery to switch bg depending on section

• Bad ass CSS3-ified slideshow for the front page, also using collective.easyslideshow
• Styled webcoutier.dropdownmenu
• Working on js for speaker profiles

• Created original artwork for the footer, depicting San Francisco from below the Bay Bridge
• Rendering the sketches in Illustrator
• Researching jQuery to swap bg images past a scrolled point

• Designed a logo for the Rapture Sprint
• Set up t-shirts for sale with the logo on Cafepress (men's) (women's) (kid's) 

• Researched travel information on SF
• Created an example form for pre-conf reqs from attendees
• Researched visa information for attendees
  

Team Git 'er Done | Chrissy Wainwright, Michael Duggan, Trish Ang, Erin Weber

• Packaged a few XDV themes from the UCLA sprint last year
• Documenting how to package a theme

Vocabulary Manager

Nathan Van Gheem and Clayton Parker worked a new API for an up-to-date vocabulary manager for Plone. Implementation actually begun.

Plone Phone Home

Eric Steele and Matt Hamilton worked on a "phone home" feature for Plone buildouts that will anonymously send product-usage data to a Google Apps database. We'll be able to use that data for general Plone usage statistics as well as include usage-over-time graphs/numbers for PSC pages. This advanced rapidly to alpha 2, and folks around the sprint began using it. Eric reported that early stats showed most users relying on unrelease versions of Plone 4.1.

Eric also working on getting automated Dexterity testing set up on jenkins.plone.org.

It was a notably slow couple of days for Eric, as he only managed to get these few pitiful things and the release of Plone 4.0.6 and 4.1rc2 done. What a slacker!

Bug Fixes

Steve Smith and Michael Smith wrestled with the Plone ticket list. They did a lot of triage, closed old tickets, and fixed some bugs.

PFG

SteveM released 1.6.1 and 1.7b1 of PloneFormGen, along with merging and releasing Nathan's Plone 4 fixes for PFGDataGrid.

Breakout Tutorials

Clayton gave a git/github tutorial on day one; SteveM gave a quick review of Dexterity on day two.

Rapture Sprint T-Shirts

Rose Pruyne designed a Cafe Press t-shirt based on her logo. It's available on-demand in Women's and Men's cuts.