1st Plone 5 Launch Team met May 13, 2015

The Plone Launch Team had its first meeting on May 13, 2015.

Initial team members are:

  • Paul Roeland (documentation)
  • Christina McNeill (communications)
  • Gabrielle Hendryx-Parker (marketing)
  • Sven Strack (documentation, installers)
  • Steve McMahon (installers)
  • Eric Steele (release manager)
  • Philip Bauer (training)
  • Kim Nguyen (convener)

The purpose of the Launch Team is to prepare the following to accompany the release of Plone 5.0 expected this fall:

  • documentation
  • training materials
  • installers
  • coordination with framework team
  • marketing
  • community communications

This is a summary of our first meeting.

General:

  • We are working towards a Plone 5 release date during Fall 2015. There will likely be one RC (release candidate) version before then.
  • We will use an issue tracker on github.com for most things.

Marketing:
Deliverables:

  • Public awareness campaign
  • New P5 materials for Plone.com
  • Marketing video
  • Webinar(s)/screencast(s)
  • Previews to CMS evaluators
  • Reach out to CMS evaluators
  • Form demo team to produce and deliver webinars
  • Recruit designers and European marketers for assistance
  • Use local events (Plone, Python, grass roots, etc.) to work on, test, demo

Installers:

  • Sven and Steve angling for an installers sprint in August (location to be determined), which will include PloneFormGen work.
  • Docker containers, Vagrant, VirtualBox installers. Possibility of Digital Ocean droplets and Linode images.
  • No formal decision on Windows installer yet.
  • There will be no OS X installer (instead, Vagrant will be the recommended installer for OS X).

Communications:

  • Create social media campaign
  • Social media: advertise P5 sprints and events
  • ...mostly in holding pattern until marketing plan is solidified

Framework team:

  • Continuing to merge fixes.
  • Need more testing of beta (and eventually RC) releases.
  • Will help create release notes, which will feed into demo plan and documentation.

Documentation:

  • Continuing to work on references to paster in documentation.
  • Will branch soon for P5.
  • Will need upgrade guide, possibly a new developer’s guide, add-ons developer guide. Plone add-ons porting guide (the start of it may be the August PloneFormGen sprint activity).
  • 4digits sprint will include an entire track for P5 docs.
  • Need guinea pigs to review P5 docs and flag problems (file issues only - no need to fix). Possibly PSU Plone User Group, students? See https://github.com/plone/documentation/issues tickets tagged with “Plone 5”.
  • Possibility of World Plone Office Day (Stefania, Gil) assistance on grabbing and fixing tickets.
  • Improved Jenkins checks are in place for Plone module documentation baselines.
  • Need screen shots, screen casts.

Training:

  • Will need to update training materials (Mastering Plone) for P5.
  • See also documentation items (e.g. new developer guide, add-on developer guide, porting guide).
3 Likes

I'm posting this here to get this on the radar of the Launch team because it is still a very relevant checklist in terms of what the Plone onboarding experience should feel like for new developers.

I'd say we're doing some of this...

I like the following recommendations for making it easier for developers:
Tutorial team: Make “gapless” hand-holding tutorial for creating your first view, form and content-type. Make it so that you do not need to look outside the tutorial or learn anything unnecessary (don’t make me think)
Picture team: draw big pictures of Plone architecture, how different parts are connected, so that new developers get hang on things easily
Document generator team: Integrate collective.developermanual with Sphinx tool that generate the reference documentation from the source code: views, viewlets, templates, CSS classes, portlets, etc.

Thanks David - those items should probably go to the documentation area. I will add them to the agenda for the next meeting, which will be Thursday, June 25, 2015, at 11 am US Central. But in the meantime you could create issues for them or see if they have something like that already under way.

The launch team has a new folder here: https://plone.org/community/teams/launch-team/