[Framework-Team] Plone 4 - holidays are over :)

[Hanno Schlichting]

Heya.

Some of us have been busy over the holiday season and worked a bit
more on Plone 4. The next question now is:

What is missing for a beta release?

I'll allow myself to give my opinion on that. Eric feel free to
disagree, it's your call :)

In general I think Plone 4 is in good overall shape. But there's some
blockers and critical issues noted in the bug tracker, which we need
to address. I cleaned up Trac, so the 4.0 milestone only has tickets
which are new to Plone 4.0 and should *all* be resolved before a
release candidate. But here's the list of things that we need to
tackle, before we can label a release "beta" in my opinion:


Unified folders
#9912, #9791

This comes down to: What to do with the "Large Plone Folder" during upgrades.

To actually unify folders, we need to migrate all existing large
folders to the new unified type. From what I understand that type
should have an option in its schema, that allows to turn on/off the
orderability. When migrating large folders, orderability should be
turned off. Currently the large folders are left as is and we don't
have such an option in the schema.


TinyMCE vs. Kupu
#9945, #9783, #9877, #9949, #9956, #9976, #9637, #9958

Overall we always have many issues with our visual editor. Kupu is far
from being problem-free, so we cannot expect TinyMCE to suddenly be
all perfect. So I wouldn't call all of the listed tickets critical.
But one really critical problems is, that TinyMCE doesn't work well
enough in Safari/Chrome to give it to normal users.

The proposed solution is to install both Kupu and TinyMCE by default
and force Kupu for all Safari/Chrome users. Kupu has such a browser
detection logic, as it also didn't work with Safari for a long time.
It did a fallback on a plain textarea, but we can do better today
having two editors with different browser coverage.


Sunburst (or themes in general)

There's quite a number of open tickets in the Templates/CSS component.
For some parts of the UI, there's currently no styling information.

While we can fix some of those during the beta cycle, I think we
should fix everything that requires changes to main_template or needs
new viewlet managers and the like before a beta release.

Noteworthy are #9278, #9995 and #8805 (don't ship with NuPlone anymore).


JS dialogs
#9805, #9806, #9921, #9693, #9957, #9964, #9977

All of these essentially mean that an operation done in a pop-up
doesn't redirect and reload a new page. So any kind of feedback
(positive, reconfirmation and failures) is lost. The other problem is
that the original page (shown in the background of the dialog) might
show information that is changing as a result of the dialog action.
For example publishing an object in a dialog, needs to refresh the
page, as its workflow state needs to be reflected, the item might now
show up in the navigation tree, a calendar or any other type of
portlet.

It's a bit sad to see these problems, as we have already encountered
all of them, when first applying AJAX/KSS in the early Plone 3 stages.
We ended up reverting to a non-AJAX UI for most things, as almost all
of our UI actions can have arbitrary effects.

I'm afraid that we need to re-evaluate all actions that use the new
dialogs and discuss them. We haven't had a PLIP review of the
individual dialogs. I think we have missed to pass on the hard earned
knowledge learned from the early Plone 3.0 days, but luckily it's not
too late.


User / Group handling
#9789, #9966, #5548, #9743, #9898, #9777, #9710, #9732, #9955, #9960,
#9742, #9748

There's a ton of problems with the various new user and groups
templates and related password handling functionality. If we want to
claim that we improved anything in this regard (as our PLIP's claim)
we need to fix this stuff. Not all of this needs to be fixed before a
beta, but we need to get some good progress on these or they'll never
be done.


Otherwise we have some issues related to the installers. I just
refactored a large part of the zope2instance recipe, which might have
broken things in the installers. I didn't test the new changes on
Windows yet, so the current recipe trunk quite definitely some issues.
I'll fix these during this week.

Finally there is one open PLIP
(https://dev.plone.org/plone/ticket/9314) about the "Developer Pack"
for the installers. I have no idea what the status on this one is.
Personally I disagree with some of the choices mentioned in the PLIP
(like shipping the unmaintained Clouseau, using eggtractor where
buildout covers the same use-case today, turning on debug-mode in
zope.conf, which should only be done via bin/instance fg vs.
bin/instance console). It would be good to get an idea what the
current status of this is and how it is implemented.

Looking at this there's still a ton to do. I'll leave it to Eric to
figure out whom to "encourage" to get these things done ;-)

Hanno