Even though Plone 4 is not ready to be used on production environments yet, several Plone products have already been upgraded to be compatible on Plone 4. There are Plone-4-compatible stable releases of such Plone products as: Kupu 1.4.16, Salesforce Base Connector 1.2, etc. Many other are still under development, going through alpha and beta stages. You can use our Products Search to look for the products available for Plone 4. For this use "CMS version" box at the left column to filter products by its compatibility with Plone versions.

There are only 17 products listed currently as working with Plone 4. Are there any other missing? Have you tried more add-ons on your Plone 4 instance? Have you developed any new product for Plone 4? Share your experience, let's make a complete list of add-ons for Plone 4 together.

The most welcomed and the most important release worth mentioning is the alpha for the next major Plone release - 4.0. Although Plone 4 is still in alpha, you can try it, see its new design, feel its new features. Hope it will not take long before stable (or at least beta) release is out.

WYSIWYG editors

Most popular WYSIWYG editors for Plone - Kupu and TinyMCE are constantly being updated to be compatible with the latest Plone versions. Being default WYSIWYG editor for Plone 3, latest 1.4.16 Kupu release is already compatible with the coming Plone 4.0 version. Latest version of default WYSIWYG editor for Plone 4 TinyMCE 2.6.4.2 is mainly a bug fix release.

Cyn.in

New version of out-of-the-box group collaboration software, cyn.in 3.0.5, was releases on November 17, 2009. Being based on the latest stable release of Plone, 3.3.1, cyn.in 3.0.5 includes lots of improvements and brings some cool new features:

• added out-of-box support for publishing content to anonymous users,
  
• enhancement within UI: user toolbar was introduced in the adder bar;
• Google Chrome Frame support added

Megaphone

Initial stable release 1.0 of a new Megaphone add-on for Plone from Groundwire (concept by Jon Stahl & Drew Bernard; development by David Glick & Jon Baldivieso) has seen the world on Nov. 11, 2009. Megaphone is built on top of several Plone products:  PloneFormGen, collective.z3cform.wizard, Salesforce PFG Adapter and Salesforce Base Connector. This is  a tool for powerful online advocacy campaigns building in Plone. The following are main features Megaphone comes with:

• allows sending letters to decision makers
• allows setting required and optional recipients
• allows saving data locally or to Salesforce.com
• allows giving email letters to targets
• allows thank-you letter customizing

collective.project

Collective.project package has gone through multiple improvements this autumn: there were 7 stable versions released. The latest one - collective.project 0.9.3 appeared on Dec 5, 2009. The goal of this package is to simplify project management with 4 (Dexterity) content types added to Plone: Client, Project, Iteration, and Task. It also includes a tool to automate creation of iterations. It comes with a project workflow for client, project, and iteration that contains active/inactive state(s).

Recent decade was rich for releasing Plone products that allows to add new types of portlets to the Plone sites as well as put them in different locations. Here are new portlets types:

• Twitter portlet 0.5 - released by Sharkbyte studios on Sep 2009. 
• Gallery Portlet - provides a single portlet which displays serie of images using JQuery fade in/out animation.
• Multilevel Navigation - a layer above Plone navigation portlet that can display the navigation tree with a configured level of deepness. Initial release - Oct 14, 2009 by Pilot Systems.

And here are the new products for managing portlets location:

• ContentWellPortlets - first stable version of the product 2.0.1 developed by WebLion Group was released on Oct 13. It enables you to put portlets in places other than right and left columns, specifically, above the main heading of the page and/or at the base of the page, above the footer. In each area, you can add up to three columns of portlets.

• collective.weightedportlets - Plone addon by Groundwire that adds the ability to tweak portlet ordering by giving each portlet a weight. First stable release was launched on Oct 12, 2009.  

• quintagroup.portletmanager.footer - allows to add portlet manager that is rendered in page footer. Initial release - Oct 7, 2009 by Quintagroup team.

• Solgema.PortletsManager - enhances Plone default portlet management system by adding new abilities (ordering and blocking by portlet). First stable release - Sep 17, 2009.

Newsletter Products for Plone

One of the best-tested and best-documented newsletter products for Plone Singing & Dancing has one stable version released 0.8.13 on October 19, 2009 with multiple improvements and bug fixes. It seems like this product has a great future with such a support.

But now only Singing&Dancing is developing, one more newsletter product for Plone, initially created by Pilot Systems, now maintained by Radim Novotny, has recently seen several stable releases. Latest PloneGazette releases 3.1.1 and 3.1.0 (Oct 2009) are also worth looking at.

eCommerce Products for Plone

In this area GetPaid seems to have taken the leading position and this is quite obvious - such amount of word is being carried out to make this product better with every release. On Oct 28, 2009 1.8 GetPaid version has seen the world. This release came with more payment processors and add on packages available, plus fixes and usability improvements in the shopping cart.

Something completely new launched Raptus AG called pcommerce.core. This seems to be a new eCommerce solution for Plone, which provides a simple shop system which supports:

• product variations
• multiple prices per product to support special prices per user or group (over the sharing tab) and prices only available for a specific time (by using the expiration date)
• multiple pluggable payment methods
• multiple currencies by using Products.CurrencyUtility

Plone4Bio

BioDec has launched a new plone project: plone4bio. The rationale of the plone4bio project is to provide a web-based integrated environment where it is possible to manage and analyze biological sequence data. The plone4bio package provides the possibility by adding new content types to the Plone CMS. Find the first stable version 1.0.1 releases on Sep, 07 at plone4bio page.

New Free Plone Themes

There were also some new free Plone themes released during last 3 months:

• SunRain Plone Theme - new Plone Skin from Quintagroup that was developed for blogging purposes specially.

• Twinapex Theme - can give your Plone 3 site a professional corporate look.

• heddex.tranquility theme - is Plone 3 visual theme from HedDex Design Studio.

• plonetheme.aclark_twitter - makes your Plone site look like my Twitter page.

When you add this portlet anywhere in the site it will display all site's tags. You are free to set cumulus portlet options so that it fits your site design, color scheme etc. Among portlet options you can find:

• Width and height of the flash tag cloud portlet
• Smallest and largest tag size
• You can set main and optionally second color of the tags for creating multi-colored tag cloud; optional highlight color when mouse is over it and background portlet color
• Possibility to enable transparent or compatibility mode
• Rotation speed. Remember that clicking the tags might turn to be a little hard, depending on your speed setting :).

P.S. Click on the image to be taken to the page with portlet cumulus demo.

Portlet Cumulus is now on PyPi. Give it a go!

Poi

Most popular Plone issue tracker Poi has new 1.2 version, released on Apr 22, 2009. This is Plone 3-only release; Plone 2.5 is no longer supported. This product was eggified and Poi is now available as Products.Poi.

Poi 2.1 has changes in UI: the responses refactoring made it possible to have a reaction form at the bottom of each issue instead of needing to create a PoiResponse. So now the issue and all responses are displayed when making your own response.

Poi 2.1 has also gone through big refactoring: some logic from the content types and python scripts (in the skin) was moved into browser views and other adapters. PoiResponses (Archetypes objects) were replaced with Zope 3 style light weight objects.

Faculty Staff Directory

• A dedicated Committees Folder view (similar to the specialies folder view) added.
  
• A Specialty has an extra schemata "Overview" with an image and richtext field. Both fields are used for the speciality_overview view.
  
• Microformats for person_view's address block added.
  
• Spanish and French translation added.
  

PloneSEO

Real Estate Broker

• French translations added
• Allow access to the AlbumView.first_image; an Unauthorized error is triggered when using this in for example a collection portlet.
• Floorplan filter bug fixed: the photo management page also filtered them, making them impossible to edit. 
• Floorplans from all the photo lists was filtered out.

Plone Get Paid

The book consists of 4 parts. I have already covered half of it - first two parts. So, I would share impressions they have made on me.

Part 1 - Background covers main introductory issues of Plone. Chapter 1 is a short, but well written chapter about Plone, its basic features, community and what Plone is and where it came from. Chapter 2 is all about installing Plone on different platforms. The explanations are really detailed and illustrated enough for anyone new to Plone. I should admit that I always needed help to install Plone on my Linux machine (even though I'm not a newbie to Plone, I have been working with it for more than 2 years). But with this book for the first time I successfully installed the latest Plone 3.2.1 version on my machine. So, for me personally, explanations on Plone installation for Linux were very valuable. Chapter 3 has the fine overview of Plone registration and logging in. All basic Plone site parts, such as logo, portal actions, personal dashboard, portlets and colophon are described here with particular preciseness.

Part 2 - I want to... has general content management issues discussed, such as how to add content to your Plone website, how to store and manage it. General workflow issues together with content rules explained in much details will help you create the necessary secure work environment. Chapters 4 and 5 are about creating web pages, news items, events, links and files within Plone. Although they provide very basic procedures for using a Plone site for keeping the content, it is really well written and suitable for the most newbie user level. Explanations are followed by multiple screenshots, making it very understandable and illustrative. Chapter 6 and 7 do a really good job on the structuring content on your website, displaying the basics of content architecture. Versioning was also described with precise details, thanks to Darci Hanning. As for newcomers to Plone this can be more than enough.

Chapter 8 is a great section on managing users and user groups within Plone. All basic roles and permissions were discussed on the basis of real example for High School members. Such living example really made it easier to grab the idea. What I liked the most is that one example project is discussed in several chapters from different perspective, making a connection between what a reader has already learned and a new material.

Chapter 9 talks in great details about workflow, states and transitions in Plone. At a first glance it seemed to be a bit confusing to get into Plone workflow engine, opening all multiple menus and tabs under portal_workflow in ZMI. This is the chapter I spent more time on than on any other chapters. Workflow has never been an easy issue to deal with, so I followed the provided step-by-step example about custom collaboration workflow creation (on p.161). I must admit that this was not so terrible as it seemed at the beginning. Matt Bowen, who is the author of this chapter, made his best to make such rather confusing issues well-explained and more clear. I would also add information on mapping states to this section too, now it is available in chapter 12 on Configuration. I think it would be better to collect all info about Types menu in one place.

Chapter 10 is a very useful how-to on portlet management in Plone. Everything beginning from default portlet management to creating new types of portlets was described (with TAL Portlet product). Much attention was paid to explaining how to assign portlets to specific objects on site, certain content type or users groups. Chapter 11 includes several examples on enabling rules on your website. Chapter 12 provides information about Plone Site Setup item. But some of it seems to be too much, for example: chapter 8 is devoted to users in groups in Plone, and I would combine information about creating new group and adding group into a group from this chapter to chapter 8. So that all info on user management is in one place.

To sum up, I should say that starting from the very basics, this book shows how to get a good understanding of Plone and use it effectively. The language of the book is rather easy, big amount of illustrative examples, step-by-step instructions and easy-to-follow how-tos make this book a pleasure to read. Overall, the authors have produced a volume that can be recommended for every beginner in Plone.

Reviewer: Olha Pelishok, content manager at Quintagroup

Most attention was paid to making Plone Products section more useful and informative. What we managed to implement so far:

1. More Products Screenshots. Screenshots were added into products description pages for better understanding the product with the first look (e.g. Plone Tabs, Plone True Gallery). 
2. More Themes Screenshots. Plone Themes and Skins section listing was expanded with skins screenshots. So now while searching for a necessary theme in this category you can see theme look immediately without need to visit every theme description page. 
3. More Products Categories. Some product sections like Other and Development tools were reorganized: new product categories were added for better division of products, according to their featured. New Plone categories that have recently been created are the following:
   
   • Import and Export - containing products for managing import/export operations in/out of Plone.
   • Navigation and Menus - containing products that are used for implementing advantage navigation on Plone sites. These products make it possible to create drop-down menus, several-lines navigation tabs, extend navigation portlet etc.
   • Rating and Evaluation - containing tools for rating and evaluating of content on Plone websites.
   • Theme Deployment - containing products for creating Plone skins: tools that allow to inspect your Plone site, implement some special visual features, change colors or borders shape, etc.
   • Third-party Integration - containing tools that allow integration of Plone with other powerful systems like Salesforce, Paypal, etc.
   • Workflow - containing products for managing workflow process in Plone.
     
4. More Products Descriptions. Every Plone category now has a short description, in which it goes about what products are included into it and what purposes can its products be used for.
   
   

Site Migration

Advanced Product Search

Rating system

So, welcome to our renewed contentmanagementsoftware.info!

Popular Products for Video Management in Plone

1. Plone4ArtistsVideo

• Plone4ArtistsVideo lets you upload a normal File to your Plone site. The file is auto-detected as a video file, metadata is auto-extracted and an appropriate view is rendered (depending on the file format).
• Plone4ArtistsVideo supports embedding of videos that are already hosted on popular video sharing sites such as Youtube, Google Video, Blip.tv or Revver.com. Simply add new Link object, paste in a URL from the remote source, and the video will be added to your Plone site complete with all the metadata.
  

2. Plumi

Author: EngageMedia
Example: http://screensessions.com, developed by bürosterngasse*

Plumi is a package of Plone products that enable you to create your own video sharing site. By adding it to an existing Plone instance you can quickly have a wide array of functionality to facilitate video distribution and community creation. Plumi package includes: ATCountry Widget, ATVocabulary Manager, Vaporisation, qRSS2Syndication, VPIP, Indytube, Content Licensing, qPloneComments.

File Storage

1. ZODB's FileStorage (Data.fs)

for ZODB versions < 3.8

2. Plone FileSystem Storage

3. Storage at External Servers

Besides, most of available Plone themes were developed for previous Plone releases and they are not compatible with the latest Plone 3 release. The reason of such small number of Plone 3 themes is that their development in Plone 3 became a bit more complicated than it used to be in previous Plone releases. This has slowed down theme development process. As a result, the amount of themes, available for Plone 3, decreased to only 13, three of which are not stable releases, just in alpha development state.

There are such Plone themes developed for Plone 3 by:

• Quintagroup:
  
  • Techlight Plone Skin
• Whiteblack Plone Skin
• Schools Plone Skin
• Lite Plone Skin
• Oberon / Tom-Wilkin Martinussen
• Darkness
• Wilkin
• Alexandr Limi / Cornelis Kolbach
  
• NuPlone
• asigot
• Peacefun Skin for Plone 3
• David Convent
• DIV Plone Style
• Grieg Medialog / Espen Moe-Nilssen
• Subskins
• Alteroo / David Bain
• Busy City Theme (alpha)
• redomino / Fabrizio Reale
• Italian Skin (XHTML Strict) (alpha)
• Simon Kaeser
• Plone Tableless (alpha)

• plone.org visual themes category should be restructured, a dedicated theming section should be created
• available themes should be divided into 2.5 and 3.0 only, while a link to other theming resources should be in the docs section
• visual change should be done, so that thumbnails illustrating what the skins look like appear on theme listing.
  

There was a special project initiated on OpenPlans - OOTB Plone Themes, aimed to increase the number of themes that ship with Plone and track additional ideas that might improve the Plone Theme story for implementation at the same time or a later date.

We hope that the situation with Plone themes quantity and, that is even more important, their quality will improve soon.

Apart from content and summaries of each chapter from the book that are now available on 'Professional Plone Development' Free Online Edition, you can also see a list of the latest updates for the book.

It is really very good that there is a possibility to gather all the improvements together. Readers all over the world can improve the book all together. The editors could collect all the improvements and release, at least, e-book with corrections.

Quintagroup has contributed to Martin Aspeli's book errata correction as well. For example, Vitaliy Podoba has noticed and posted the following misprints from the book:

1) misprints:

• page 242 Contains a typo in the third paragraph, the first sentence:
  

  'The code in activityreport.py is similar to thaat of the other views in the browser sub-package...'

  mistake is in the word 'thaat' - double 'a' should be deleted.
• page 176 Second sentence in the first paragraph in 8 section (Views and Other Presentation Components) contains the word 'outlned' instead of outlined.
  

2) broken code:

• page 66 Code example line at Class declaration TestDocuments, method definition testSetTitle :
  

  self.assertEquals("New title", self.folder.d1.Title()

  assertEquals method called without close parenthesis. The correct code should be:
  

  self.assertEquals("New title", self.folder.d1.Title())

• page 202 Last three rows of code example:
  

  # This turns a list of title->id pairs into a Zope 3 style
  
  vocabulary return SimpleVocabulary.fronmItems(items)
  
  directlyProvides(CurrentFilmsVocabularyFactory, IVocabularyFactory)
  

  'vocabulary' word should be in comment line, and the second line should begin with 'return' word, and the last line: directlyProvides... should begin with decreased line indentation (out of function body)
  

    def CurrentFilmsVocabularyFactory(context):
        """Vocabulary factory for currently published films
        """
        catalog = getToolByName(context, 'portal_catalog')
        items = [(r.Title, r.UID) for r in
                    catalog(object_provides=IFilm.__identifier__,
                            review_state="published",
                            sort_on='sortable_title')]
        # Turns a list of title->id pairs into a Zope 3 style vocabulary
        return SimpleVocabulary.fromItems(items)
    directlyProvides(CurrentFilmsVocabularyFactory, IVocabularyFactory

Thus, the changes to make are the following:
1. make the comment shorter so that it fits on one line
2. second-to-last line should start with 'return'
3. outdent the last line so that it is aligned with the outermost "def".

• page 204 In 'Field and Object Validation' section third paragraph, second sentence:
  

  'It is not very hard to register your own generic validators - see Products.ATContentTypes.validators for several examples ...'

  path to 'validators' module is good for importing but actually validators code are placed in 'Products.ATContentTypes.lib.validators'.
  

The correct line should be:


    - see Products.ATContentTypes.lib.validators

• page 229 Third piece of code first line:

>>> from Products.PloneTestCase.setup import portal_owner from

word 'from' at the end of the line should begin second line of session.

There are Quintagroup's Plone-developers impression of Martin Aspeli's book listed below.

Besides defining ":opener-init" even that initializes opener, developer has ability to extend/override open/close events:

.term:opener-init{
  evt-init-elementSelector: '.details';
}

.term:opener-open{
  action-client: executeCommand;
  executeCommand-commandName: replaceInnerHTML;
  executeCommand-commandSelector: '#status';
  executeCommand-html: 'expanded';
}

.term:opener-close{
  action-client: executeCommand;
  executeCommand-commandName: replaceInnerHTML;
  executeCommand-commandSelector: '#status';
  executeCommand-html: 'collapsed';
}

and HTML for the samle is:

<hr />
<div id="status">Current status</div>
<hr />

<div class="term">
  History
  <div class="details">
    Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Vestibulum
    iaculis eros eu purus. Integer accumsan leo id lorem viverra vulputate.
    Donec feugiat nunc molestie massa nonummy pulvinar. Proin porta pede
    sit amet lectus. Duis leo urna, tempor non, condimentum condimentum,
    commodo non, libero. Integer feugiat, pede at.
  </div>
</div>

The resulting behaviour on page is:

If you do not see a flash movie above, see original post.

The important thing is that on open and close you can have client-side or server-side actions. You can disable default expand/collapse behaviour, with preventDefault parameter:

.term:opener-open{
  preventDefault: true;
}

In the case you need your opener controller to be inserted into specific place, you can use pair of controllerPlacementSelector parameters:

dl:opener-init{
  evt-init-elementSelector: '> dd';
  evt-init-controllerPlacementSelector: '> dt';
}

if the above sample is applied to following HTML code:

<dl>
  <dt>History</dt>
  <dd>
    Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Vestibulum
    iaculis eros eu purus. Integer accumsan leo id lorem viverra vulputate.
    Donec feugiat nunc molestie massa nonummy pulvinar. Proin porta pede
    sit amet lectus. Duis leo urna, tempor non, condimentum condimentum,
    commodo non, libero. Integer feugiat, pede at.
  </dd>
</dl>

And the result is:

If you do not see a flash movie above, see original post.

The whole definition list has opener assigned. Controller (clickable handle) is inserted into <dt> element, not in root of list (that can confuse some browsers). This is why I avoided dl/dt/dd example in my introduction post.

After installation product offers following event:

opener-selector:opener-init {
   evt-init-elementSelector: element-selector;
}

All elements that matches opener-selector will get controller that will offer expand/collapse functionality with mouse click.

Real-life example is:

.term:opener-init {
   evt-init-elementSelector: '.details';
}

and having HTML code:

<div class="term">
  History
  <div class="details">
    Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Vestibulum
    iaculis eros eu purus. Integer accumsan leo id lorem viverra vulputate.
    Donec feugiat nunc molestie massa nonummy pulvinar. Proin porta pede
    sit amet lectus. Duis leo urna, tempor non, condimentum condimentum,
    commodo non, libero. Integer feugiat, pede at.
  </div>
</div>

will produce into something like:

If you do not see a flash movie above, see original post.

November 7, 2006
Internet Explorer has deprecated the implementation of the XmlHttpRequest object in MSXML 5.0, resulting in security warnings for things like LiveSearch and Kupu — but only if you have Office 2003 installed on the computer where you use Plone (or if you have installed MSXML 5.0 separately). Plone relies on an external library called Sarissa, which needs to be updated to check for the new native implementation of XmlHttpRequest in IE7. It's likely that we will ship a new release of Plone with these included during the coming days, but at the moment there is unfortunately no easy way to fix it yourself.

Here are some comments from Plone-Users mailing list:

Nicklas:

I do not know exactly wich parts of plone that uses it, but kupu is one of the
instaces where you could find this file.

This is the instances i found:

Products/kupu/common/sarissa.js
Products/validation/kupu/common/sarissa.js
Products/validation/CMFPlone/skins/plone_3rdParty/sarissa.js
Products/CMFPlone/skins/plone_3rdParty/sarissa.js

and i changed these lines to this:

    _SARISSA_DOM_PROGID = pickRecentProgID
(["Msxml2.DOMDocument.4.0", "Msxml2.DOMDocument.3.0", "MSXML2.DOMDocument", "MS
XML.DOMDocument", "Microsoft.XMLDOM"], [["SELECT_NODES", 2],["TRANSFORM_NODE", 
2]]);
    _SARISSA_XMLHTTP_PROGID = pickRecentProgID
(["Msxml2.XMLHTTP.4.0", "MSXML2.XMLHTTP.3.0", "MSXML2.XMLHTTP", "Microsoft.XMLH
TTP"], [["XMLHTTP", 4]]);
    _SARISSA_THREADEDDOM_PROGID = pickRecentProgID
(["MSXML2.FreeThreadedDOMDocument.4.0", "MSXML2.FreeThreadedDOMDocument.3.0"]);
    _SARISSA_XSLTEMPLATE_PROGID = pickRecentProgID
(["Msxml2.XSLTemplate.4.0", "MSXML2.XSLTemplate.3.0"], [["XSLTPROC", 2]]);

Duncan Booth:

Have you installed kupu 1.3.9 from plone.org/products/kupu? That should
replace sarissa with an IE7 compatible version.

Now I see Andre Nogueira comment

December 4, 2006
Sarissa team released a new script version
I just put the new version of sarissa.js in my custom folder to solve the script problem.
I still testing, in plone, but looks ok.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/sarissa

So it would be nice if people post comments if they have some issues with new sarissa.js in Kupu 1.3.x or 1.4 beta.

Plone Skin Dump (qPloneSkinDump) allows to create Plone product based on some ZMI located skin folder (eg "custom") from portal_skins. So you can easy create Plone product with skin based on folder with new styles and page templates. Plone Skin Dump take into consideration positioning of portlets and styles in portal_css tool.

metal:use-macro="here/portlet_foo/macros/portlet"

• The workspaces at members.plone.org are they the same as teamspaces?if not, how are they different?
• What is the great benefit of workspaces versus ordinary member folders?

To be honest I've had more success with Teamspaces than Workspaces (I've used both).  Teamspaces does bring a slightly new concept to the table (teams) for Plone but is worth it in my opinion.  I've ran into issues when using workspaces with CMFMember, for example.

Also, I'm not entirely sure workspaces has been updated to work on Plone 2.1 (I haven't used it on any plone 2.1 sites yet) but I know there's a beta or final release of teamspaces that does.

i'm pretty sure they're completely different.  teamspaces are containers that allow for heightened priveleges for certain users (i.e. team members).  it was designed for flexibility, to be able to model complex organizational structures.

workspaces, which i know less about, i believe are a type of virtual folder, where users can add content that will then end up in another location.  you'll notice that when you add a news item in your workspace on plone.org, it actually ends up in the 'newsitems' folder.  this allows multiple folks to contribute to a central location, but it does so via a "window" into that location rather than by managing security in that location.


"great benefit" is subjective.  for some use cases member folders might work better, for others workspaces.  i've not used workspaces at all, am not even sure my description above is 100% correct, so i won't try to answer this.

For all new users you can set it in portal_memberdata->properties
for all existing users you have to run a script that sets this property (*I think*)

In addition to that you can always customize the wysiwyg_support script in
plone_wysiwyg to take precendence for your preferred editor if the user in
question has the default setting.

That is unlikely to have any effect.

Kupu and Epoz define their own wysiwyg_support template which overrides the
one in plone_wysiwyg. There are instructions on Plone.org for defining a
suitable template for FCK Editor, although if you are using Kupu 1.3.x the
support for FCKEditor is already included in Kupu's template so you can
ignore the Plone howto.

If you want to customise wysiwyg_support you will need to find the
appropriate version and customise it.

There are no special steps. There are a few gotchas that people are  running into along the way regarding third-party products (that's always  hard to predict), and we're working on collecting these in a centralized  location.

The procedure is the normal one:

1. Make sure the third-party products you use have been updated or verified  to work on Plone 2.1
2. Install the new Plone version
3. Move over your Data.fs and any Products / External Methods
4. Start the new Zope/Plone
5. Go to the ZMI
6. Go to portal_migration
7.  Click the migrate button

My estimate would be: never  :-(

Individual situations are so different that I'm afraid there
will be no general answer to this.

•   it may not work to upgrade Plone and some 3rd Party product  in one step (example: my CMFBibliographyAT in it's most recent  version needs its own migration when you have content generated  using an older version of it. This is usually meant to be  triggered by reinstalling it - so you either upgrade it before  migrating your Plone or afterwards. Maybe other products have  similar implications.)
•  For reasons I won't get into here, I had a site with some content  items where the executable ownership was broken  (the path to the user folder where the account was defined was wrong).  This prevented the in-place migration to fail completely  (even if 'force migration' was selected).  Fixing the ownership in the original site resolved this.
• For reasons I don't know, it may help to do the ATCT migration first  in some cases! That is, update everything on the file system, copy  Data.fs, restart Zope and then access the site's quickinstaller to  install ATContentTypes.  Then go to the the portal_atct tool, do a 'version  migration' followed by a 'type migration'. Now a 'portal_migration'  migration (!) might have more chances of getting through.  (I was really surprized about this. It was just last week that I  had this situation with a site where the migration from the  migration tool couldn't even be forced but everything was nice and dandy when decomposed as outlined above. Again, I have no idea why.)
  

Because products can do *anything* to an existing instance (even down to  monkeypatching Zope and overriding behaviour there). There is no way we  can guard against this.

It doesn't. Plone changes, is improved, refactored, deprecated methods are  removed - and the responsibility of keeping up with this rests on the  Product author, not the Plone Team.

Then it's probably putting in some structures that the migration can't  handle. The migration code has been made more robust, but in 95% of the  cases it's something wrong with the way that product does things. In the 5  remaining percent, we fix the migration.

Testing migrations is a time-consuming process, and if you're not  responsible enough to test migration during the beta and RC releases, we  can't predict what will go wrong in your specific case.

• Need help with installation of Plone
• Need help migrating a Plone instance
• Need help with setting up caching

• Want to help others with the above!

Jon Stahl, Marshall Mayer:

Like many of you, we have long been frustrated with the lack of a solid,
moderately-featured forum product for Plone.

With the release of Plone 2.1 and Ploneboard 0.1 beta 1, we believe that the
time is ripe for the Plone community to pull together the technical, human and
financial resources needed to help grow Ploneboard from a promising first
release into the best-of-breed forum solution for Plone.

With that goal in mind, Marshall Mayer of LiveModern.com and I have started
pulling together some ideas for community-oriented process that we hope will:

-- Catalyze the development of a requirements document that defines features and
capabilities for future releases of Ploneboard
-- Pulling together the funding necessary to support Ploneboard development work

We've written up our initial thoughts at
http://www.seattleplone.org/Members/jonstahl/ideas-for-ploneboard. 

We're only just getting started; everything is open for discussion.  Our first
task is to find out who else is interested in joining the conversation, and to
get the process underway.  We invite you to read our initial thoughts,  identify
yourself as someone who's interested in this topic, and to contribute your
comments, ideas, etc. 

Our vision is of a community-driven process that builds on the great start that
Ploneboard already has. We're not hardcore Plone developers, and we're not
interested in in starting yet another forum project.  We're power-users and
Plone-powered website developers, and we feel that the best way we can "scratch
our itch" is by attempting to jump-start a process that will aggregate the needs
and resources of the Plone community and allow the many talented folks who've
already gotten Ploneboard this far to do even more great work --  and to
continue plugging new people (including users!) into the process.

Our friend and colleague Brian Gershon of RagingWeb will be attending the Plone
Conference this weekend -- he would love to talk more in person with anyone
who's interested.  (We wish we could join you all in person, too!)

Very nice idea. I have a lot of problems with CMFBoard (empty titles, unable posts for anonymous, etc.). I'd like to add Forum to ContentManagegementSoftware.Info but CMFBoard is not suitable for me. It's really great initiative.

The problem is even in basic functionality that is important for standart website: WYSIWYG editor, Poll, Blog Newsletter, Forum, Contact Forms, Photo Gallery, Events, News, etc.

I see that there is a problem with Forums and contact forms (PloneFormMailer is a good tool but it is unusable for users),  for Plone. Plone 2.1 solves a lot of problems for WYSWYG editing and Photo management... I hope after several months we will have such polished products that  users will not be able to say that some PHP based CMS (Typo3, Mambo, Drupal, Xaraya, etc) has better (more featured)  addons then Plone. Well, tay be PloneMall will take more time to be complete then OsCommerce :-).  Yes! Plone is used  as Enterprise solution, but it is also very good for simple websites. I suppose that it's  important in marketing purposes.

Ben Lobo:

I've got a client who wants to develop a kind of work pool website where employers seeking skilled and/or manual labourers can search a database to find available workers.

This will involve enabling people seeking work to register on the site and, for a fee, add details of their skills, etc.

My inclination would be to develop this site in PHP and MySQL because that's where I've got most experience and I don't know enough about Plone and its database management capabilities to convince me that it would be as easy to manage and maintain the data as I know it would be in MySQL.

On the other hand, I really like the idea of using Plone because it's got the registration and membership side of things all covered and it's so easily extensible.

I'd like to hear anyone's opinions about whether or not Plone is suited for such a project (bearing in mind my limited Plone knowledge).

Martin Aspeli

There are a lot of issues here. I'll try to list some of them in bullet  form; feel free to reply on the list if you want more detail.

 - Zope/Plone is a very different model to PHP/MySQL. That means there  will be a learning curve, and you'll have to un-learn some of the things  you take for granted in PHP/MySQL.

 - However, ease code re-use, usability, the add-on products  (plone.org/products) and many other factors make Zope/Plone a powerful  platform that may help you get up and running *quickly* (if you can manage  the learning curve)

 - Zope is an object oriented system. You have content objects, organised  in a hierarchy of folder-like and document-like objects, inside the ZODB  (Zope Object Database). This is very good for storing unstructured or  loosely structured content. It's less ideal for storing a lot of  standardised data you want to cross-reference and analyse in different  ways. For this a relational database is probably better suited.

 - However, you can connect Zope to a relational database, including MySQL  and PostgreSQL. Look into ZSQL Methods for some information on this.

If it were me, I'd probably use Plone for the UI and member management,  turning off the things that didn't make sense, and store the jobseeker  data in PostgreSQL (or MySQL) and use ZSQL methods to analyse/match/query.  For the member management, CMFMember may be a good place to start. You can  use something like SQLWindowStorage or SharedSQLStorage to get the  standard member data to be stored in an SQL database instead of the ZODB  (I wrote SharedSQLStorage for a customer project where we had most  membership data in an SQL database, managed via CMFMember exactly in this  way). Then you can write some ZSQL methods to do the matching and some  page templates to display them.

Dave Zoltok asked:

I've noticed in a few places (such as the Preferences page) that the right portlets are not displayed. I found the code to do that, but I also noticed that even though no portlets show up, the space where they would be is still present. Is there a way to hide not only the portlets, but the entire column, in a page template?

<?xml:namespace prefix = metal />
<metal:override fill-slot="column_two_slot">
</metal:override>

Which is what is done for prefs_main_template.pt, seems to work fine for that here, it even gets rid of the entirely (or the div if you are using tableless).

You could use CSS to hide the column altogether by including something similar to the following in your page template as an inline style.
#portal-column-two { display: none; }

Or, you could use the Properties tab in the ZMI. Navigate to your page template in the ZMI, click the Properties tab, add a new property named right_slots (type = lines) with an empty value. Note: You could also use the latter as a method to hide the left or right column on a folder-by-folder basis.

Gabriele asked:

I can't find in Plone 2.0.5 where I give permission to user to published Events. In my Plone site I want that user can published event without confirm. Is it possible?

J Cameron Cooper answered:

Go to the workflow tool's "Contents" tab and create a new workflow by copying and renaming the 'folder_workflow' (it doesn't have a review step). Call it 'event_workflow' or something. Go to the "Transitions" tab, the 'publish' transition, and remove the "Review portal content" permission requirement. Now go back to the "Workflows" tab and assign your new workflow to the Event type.

As previously mentioned, the only real hiccup I had when migrating this site from Plone 2.0.5 to 2.1 was dealing with CMFPhoto. Since I couldn't find any information regarding this issue (and was too lazy to ask the respective authors...) I simply did what I always do in such cases: make guesses and apply the good ol' scientific approach known as Trial & Error...

So, what I've learned is this:

1. CMFPhoto is broken under 2.1 in such a way, that you can still access the actual images (by entering the complete URL, or via WebDAV) but photos linked to using the <img src="..."/> won't show up and accessing scaled versions using the /variant/xxx scheme are also broken.
   
2. The default Image type in 2.1 (ATImage from the ATCT Product, actually - three cheers for ATCT, everybody! Thank you...) is capable of scaling but uses a different naming convention. Digging in the source revealed the following sizes:
                  sizes= {'large'   : (768, 768),
                       'preview' : (400, 400),
                       'mini'    : (200, 200),
                       'thumb'   : (128, 128),
                       'tile'    :  (64, 64),
                       'icon'    :  (32, 32),
                       'listing' :  (16, 16),
                      },

3. To access these sizes, append /image_XXX to the URL, where XXX is one of the above sizes.
   
4. To migrate existing Albums and Photos you can download a folder via WebDAV, delete the Album on the server and re-upload the album (which is now a folder). You'll still have to adjust any old-style references to scaled versions, but hey... it's a start....
5. Choosing 'photoalbum view' in the new 'display' menu when inside a folder containing images will result in the good ol' PhotoAlbum view from the CMFPhotoAlbum product.
   

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Few weeks ago I found out that Technorati tags can be very helpfull because of

• Technorati Plone tag
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