[Product-Developers] PLIP submission for Plone 4 is now open

[Matthew Wilkes]

Hello all!

The eagle-eyed amongst you will have spotted this on plone.org, but  
for those who haven't…

I'm happy to announce on behalf of the Plone 4 Framework Team that we  
are now considering community proposals for substantive improvements  
to Plone.


What is a PLIP?
===============

A Plone Improvement Proposal, or PLIP, is a detailed description of an  
improvement to Plone that goes above and beyond a normal bug fix.   
Changes that significantly alter backwards compatibility, visuals or  
APIs are only permitted as PLIPs for a major release; any such  
proposal not entered in this round would have to wait until Plone 5 in  
order to be considered.  Anyone can submit a PLIP but you should only  
submit a PLIP if you intend to either do the work yourself or take  
responsibility for finding people who will.

Plone 4 is intended to be an intermediate release between the very  
stable Plone 3 and more experimental improvements planned to become  
available within the next few years.  The primary focus is on bringing  
Plone up-to-date with newer technologies while making the platform  
easier to use for integrators and end-users.  Although the release  
schedule is not yet fixed, the final version is likely to be released  
at the end of this year.


How do I get started?
=====================

Submissions are open as of now, and will remain open until 0700 UTC on  
the 20th of June, 2009.  PLIPs for Plone 4 should be submitted to https://dev.plone.org/plone/newticket 
  with the ticket type set to "PLIP". Any PLIPs submitted to the old  
system on plone.org should be resubmitted to the new location for  
consideration.

Once you finish writing your proposal, set the milestone to "4.0" so  
the team knows to give you feedback.  Once the submission deadline  
passes, the Framework Team will vote on the submissions and set an  
implementation deadline.  A feature can only be included in Plone 4 if  
both the proposal and implementation are approved by the framework team.

A PLIP should include information on why a change is important, how it  
will be achieved, and an analysis of any downsides to it being  
adopted.  The standard format can be seen in previous PLIPs, such as http://plone.org/products/plone/roadmap/253 
.

We're all very excited by this process, it's a chance to improve the  
system that we all work with.  I hope you all consider submitting  
PLIPs, feel free to email plone-developers or stop by #plone-framework  
on IRC if you need help or want to discuss something in advance.



Matt