This morning we had a meeting to discuss where Plone is going in the near future. Included in the discussion were myself, Peter Holzer, Timo Stollenwerk, Victor Fernandez de Alba, Erico Andrei, Jens Klein, Tiberiu Ichim, and Paul Roeland.
While most of the pieces for this roadmap are already in place or in progress, it had not yet been determined how they would fit together. We want to clear confusion for everyone in the community from core developers to end users.
Here is what was defined:
Plone 6 will use Volto by default. Volto will not be a separate piece to be used on top, it will be Plone. Newcomers to Plone will be directed to start a site that uses the React frontend.
Plone 6 will continue to allow the current server-side rendering and Diazo theming without Volto. This will be referred to as "Plone Classic".
Plone 6 Classic will include Barceloneta LTS and resource registry updates (there are already PLIPs for these). We realize these changes may break existing themes and add-ons, in which case sites can stay on Plone 5.2 if necessary.
Plone 6 will be a long-term support (LTS) release - we anticipate it will be around for several years. Integrators using a Diazo workflow should not feel pressure to move to Volto immediately.
We will be working to make sure language (removing references to Volto CMS, using Plone Classic for non-Volto theming) is updated in the appropriate places, including talks at the conference. Having the above stated roadmap will help the community determine next steps towards completing Plone 6, including things like marketing and documentation. There is still a lot of work to be done to finalize Plone 6, since a lot of the progress that normally would have happened this year was affected by our inability to meet in person for sprints. Further discussions will happen during the conference!
'By default' could be expressed more explicit here. Plone 6 will use Volto by default if you create a new Plone 6 Site.
I realise the following is very difficult to plan or predict, but shouldn't we add more information and guidance for existing users of Plone 5 on migration?
AFAICS at this moment (december 2020) Plone 6.0 will not offer an 'out of the box' migration from Plone 5.2 to Plone 6 with Volto React frontend.
There are too many technical issues and edge cases to solve to pull this off. It doesn't mean its not possible, but it's not included or supported in the core Plone 6.0 distribution.
You can migrate from core Plone 5.2 to core Plone 6.0 Classic, but only if you have Plone 5.2 already running with Python 3.
With this migration from Plone 5.2 to Plone 6.0 the usual care has to taken with customisations and the use and compatibility of add'ons. Also because of Barceloneta LTS users/integrators should expect more work to update their custom themes as the default html templates in Plone 6 Classic have been changed to only contain Bootstrap 5 css classes.
Everything you say here is likely going to be the case, but the purpose of this post was to provide a high-level expectation of what is to come. Explicit details will be added to documentation as the Plone 6 story is more clearly defined. We do want to make sure that upgrade paths are well documented to make the process easy for everyone.
The meeting this came from was not a specific committee meeting, it was more about clearing confusion, resolving potential conflict, and making sure everyone is on the same page of what Plone 6 will look like.
There will be a Roadmap team that will have meetings, and that will be a topic at the next Steering Circle meeting. The Steering Circles itself will not determine the roadmap, it's more about collaboration among the various teams.
