The application process for the 2018 Google Summer of Code will begin soon, and I'd like to begin collecting ideas for projects. The ideas we publish will help to determine who applies to be a student with us. So it's important that we have a solid offering of projects students will want to be part of.
If you have some thoughts about a project you'd like to see happen, please share it with me, so we can get it into our list. I've set up a google form to help us get started.
This is a brainstorming session. Don't censor yourself. If you've got some crazy ideas floating around for ways to make Plone even more awesome, now is the time to put fingers to keyboard and shake them out!
A student could receive some AWS (or other vendor) credit and R&D the good / efficient ways to host Plone at different scales (amount of content, request volume) for the official documentation. There is a surprising amount of tweakables and hosting architecture available in the stack. Building reliable metrification is also not trivial.
It’s been a week since my first ask, and we’ve gotten three responses from two people. I know this community has a ton of opinions on how Plone should be. I’m sure you’ve all got pain points you’d like to see fixed, wish-lists you like to see fulfilled if only there were enough time. Now is the time to get those ideas out there in the open.
My job here is to shame you all into contributing ideas. So jump on it! Here’s your chance to make Plone what you want it to be (even if only a little bit more so).
For now, I have submitted 2 ideas using the Google form but I haven't discussed them here (my understanding of your original message was you expected us to just post proposals on the Google form, but it makes this discussion quite silencious).
Let's fix that:
first I proposed a GraphQL implementation on top of the Plone RESTAPI
and I have also proposed an Elm Plone frontend implementation
what about a z3cform widget to store json/dicts in the plone.registry?
This could be a lightweight replacement for datagridfield and would help to not bloat the the registry like mosaic is doing with a lot of smal entries. We could have have a single entry with a json-object/dict per tile or any other entity.
This could also be build in angular/react/vue & co.
A quick look at it, possible candidates are below. I don't want to overload the system by proposing all of them so feedback from others would be appreciated.
improve collective analytics so we have a good solution for analytics that includes downloads and pdfs. ie server-side analytics hooks. Not sure this is enough for a full GSOC though
A TTW pdb for pythonscripts that works in production. I have an idea how to implement this
A builtin accessibility checker in tinymce such that you can ensure content is accessible. perhaps full site scan too.
Some of these are a bit hard to propose as there is no documentation or communication with regard to some existing efforts on improving the plone UX and what problems from above they are aiming to fix. (We miss you @optilude and your documentation first approach!).
I have not included stuff that folderless/mosaic/"removing default pages" would solve. Still waiting for this after all this time Still getting support issues where someone accidentally changes the display of their homepage and complains.
@djay, do feel free to submit as many of them as you like. One of the points of the brainstorming form is that it allows you to submit ideas about who would make a good mentor for your ideas. I'm hoping once we've gathered a bunch of ideas to hold a discussion here in the forums to weigh the merits of various ideas, and polish them up a bit. So don't worry about being thorough at this point. Quantity over quality at this stage.
Not knowing how to get Plone to look 'like you want' is probably 'scaring away new users'.
I think 'adding galleries' and 'bling' is important to get new Plone users.
Mosaic is a big step forward, so I would love to see for example:
a) A 'page layout' Mosaic editor (where one could place the navigation, search box, logo, etc.
b) A 'images (gallery)' tile where one could choose or upload images
c) A way to add css classes and/or animations to (some) tiles.
I have been trying to do b) myself ( with Tuple, Datagridfield and plone.formwidget.multifile ) but it looks like it needs 'a different approach to work')
OK everyone, cover your ears because this is That Castle Moment ™ again... Castle has slots that let you place tiles anywhere on the page (similar to ContentWellPortlets). It also has image and gallery and slideshow tiles.
Still getting support issues where someone accidentally changes the display of their homepage and complains.