First glance at Plone 3

rants, zope3, Plone

Thanks to the easy plone 3 buildout (plonout), I'm having my first look at the upcoming Plone 3. Some of the more evident changes:

• Versioning is now possible thanks to CMFEditions, which means a "Save as version" option in the edit screen and a "Versions" page on objects.
  
• The Kupu integration has been improved, the Kupu configlet offering new functions: the possibility to edit the toolbar, a new, streamlined interface to control the resource types and the possibility to replace the reference browser with a kupu drawer. In the edit screens kupu now has an "Anchor" button, which allows anchor insertion.
  
• The interface hasn't changed at all, at least looking at its surface. Would this mean easy transition from older 2.1 - 2.5 sites to the new Plone 3.0?
• wicked is integrated, meaning you can get easy wiki-like behaviour, "without the aftertaste of wikis"
• The calendar has now a configlet, offering the old ZMI options accessible until now in portal_calendar
• A configlet to specify the default mimetype for editable text fields (Types Settings)
• The 'sharing' tab is back, with an improved interface
• The different views on objects are loaded through AJAX and there's a "Loading" OSD that appears at the bottom of the page
• In the Edit screen there is a "toolbar" at that top that uses AJAX to load several views that gather different settings that were spread among the Edit and Properties screens until now.
  
• There is now a portlet management engine which allows portlet customizations. To me, at first look, this management page seemed extremely crowded and unintuitive. But this was just the first impression, after a minute of playing I already felt comfortable with it. Unfortunately, there's no "Simple HTML portlet", an option already offered by other portlet engines such as CMFContentPanels and the "Classic portlet" required knowing a template path and a macro nameb, but I'm sure this "Simple HTML portlet" is something that could be easily written. On the plus side, the portlet management engine offers the possibility to place portlets only for a specific group or for specific content types, which couldn't be easily done using CMFContentPanels.
• There is a "rules" option in the action menu on the main page, which leads to several pages that allow defining actions based on conditions, but I couldn't get it to do much and didn't insist on it.

A lot of new, exciting stuff, without even looking under the hood (Zope 2.10, lots of zope 3 technology used, KSS and Ajax). I've encountered several bugs and there are several areas that could be improved, so it would be great if more people would download the ploneout and run Plone 3.0, at least to have a look, play with the new technologies and report the bugs. 

I presume that upgrading Plone 2.1/2.5 to Plone 3 would be relatively easy if there weren't many customizations done to the management interface, but this new technology also adds to the complexity of the Plone as application development framework. One last thing, if you haven't learned Zope 3 by now, start right now, it has become unavoidable in developing for Plone 3.