I'm pleased to let you know, that we are organizing an open strategic Plone Community sprint at Jyväskylä, Finland, between 3rd and 7th of July 2017.
The sprint is sponsored by University of Jyväskylä, and we'll focus on polishing editors' user experience on Plone 5.1 UI (including plone.app.multilingual). By the time of the sprint, our university should have already hundreds of content editing users using Plone 5.1 (our e-learning and video publishing apps remain on Plone 4.3 still for a good time because of heavy customizations or add-ons).
If you have haven't seen the midnight Sun yet, that's a perfect excuse to come. Jyväskylä is still hundreds of kilometers below the Artic Circle, but because we are organizing the sprint only a week after the annual midsummer festival, you only need to come a days in advance to take a trip to the Northern Finland (a.k.a. Lapland). For example, a one-way train ticket bought well in advance from Jyväskylä to Rovaniemi, costs less than 40 € (the distance is about 550 km).
Previously, I believed, that price of participation would be a blocker for organizing a sprint in Finland. Yet, this time it really should not be. At least from Europe:
It's New Year, so register now and get your flight tickets to HEL from the New Year sales of airlines!
Advance train tickets (currently 15 € for one way) became available two months before the sprint. That's a great price for a high quality train ride with seat reservation, WIFI and electricity for laptop.
We coordinate affordable budget accommodation with fixed price of 210 € from 2.7. to 8.7. in a shared apartment with 3-4 private bedrooms (and real kitchen!).
If you are not able to come, but care about the editor user experience on Plone, please, sponsor your trusted developer to be able to join us!
We hope to see many of you in Finland this year!
PS. Accidentally, it's also the 100th year of Finland's independence, so there should be a good amount of other cultural events in Finland during this summer.
A quick update on Midsummer Sprint Jyväskylä 3.7.–7.7.2017. We have still space for about 10 sprinters left.
I've been asked, is the sprint is easy to travel to? Yes it is. Take your favourite flight connection to HEL, and a 3,5 hour train from the airport with a single easy change to Jyväskylä. All hotels and the sprint venue is within 15 min walk distance. Our coordinated accommodation is a bit further, about 40 min walk from the station, but we help you to get there!
Sprint topics are getting more details. It really seems, Midsummer Sprint is the first sprint this year with focus on the current release of Plone!
Barceloneta, our default theme, has been almost untouched since the release of Plone 5. @sneridagh is aware of some issues need to be fixed and would need help to do that at the sprint. I'm sure that there's a lot of low hanging CSS fruits there waiting to be picked.
Safe HTML transform is broken on Plone 5 (and has always been complex to configure because of overlapping features in TinyMCE). @tisto has promised to come to lead fixing this (and save our editors from themselves).
React JS has been approved into core and there's on-going work to replace and rewrite our core patterns to base on React (and Redux) instead of jQuery templates, Backbone and friends. There might be a GSOC project to work on this, but for sure there's work left for interested in the sprint.
Products.RedirectionTool has been approved to be merged on core, but work is still unfinished. If you'd like to have nice redirection tools built-in and maintained in Plone core, come to the sprint to finish the work.
New login form was another thing dropped from Plone 5 release because of lack of time. Some work has been done in plone.login, but left uncompleted. It seems that @esteele has has registered for the sprint, so I'm looking forward for him to lead the work he started years ago
@svx has registered to work on something documentation related, and I'm sure he would be happy to lead any documentation work for anyone interested.
PloneFormGen has still a few issues on Plone 5 (at least with RichText field and export / import). We should either fix it (@rioksane is selecting issues) or replace it with collective.easyform. Possibly merge collective.easyform into PloneFormGen 2. Possibly with backwards compatible API for old extensions. Welcome to Midsummer Sprint to experiment with this!
Are you either using or supporting Plone at your University? Please, come to share your experiences with our @rioksane. We are in progress of slowly rewriting our in-house add-ons for Plone 5, and that would also a great opportunity to do more open source collaboration with other Plone EDU users.
Our sprint page has a few updates as well for coordinated accommodation, travel and maps. If you want our 210 eur / week accommodation, please, register now (or before 1st of May 2017).
Families are welcome. We will have unofficial family track with including cultural sights and play ground trips every day. If you are interested, please, contact me directly (unless you already have).
Our social / evening program is still under planning. If the weather is good and dry, expect to be outdoor (including trips to forest) during evenings.
We still hope to see more of you in Finland this summer!
About a week ago, we updated the sprint home page with payment instructions for the coordinated accommodation, and posted also an email update about it. If you still want our coordinated budget accommodation:
follow the instruction to pay the accommodation on or before 24th of May (payment confirms the accommodation)
We'll send a reminder for the "saver tickets" after they are available for both directions (they should become available exactly 2 months prior the departure time).
I believe, the most probable sprint topics will be the ones listed in the previous posts. After the previous update, @rioksane has shown interest for coordinating fixes for PloneFormGen on Plone 5. I'm also looking forward, if we could integrate some React JS components from Rob Gietema's plone-react already for the current pattern based Plone UI.
We are very happy to announce that we have been awarded strategic sprint funding by Plone Foundation to also work on the design of the future Plone UX. In practice, this means no less than @Albert Casado is able to join the sprint to continue his work on Pastanaga UI concept!
Another great news is that one of our GSOC students, @mikkohu will join the sprint to not only work on his GSOC project, but also to learn the spirit of our community.
Finally, the promised reminder: saver tickets for our national railway company are now in sale! (https://www.vr.fi/en/) In time of writing saver tickets are available already up to Thursday 6th of July, on tomorrow up to Friday 7th of July and on day after tomorrow up to Saturday 8th of July.
By all means this list ist not fixed, there are enough other documentation related topics to sprint on !
Still I would like to remind you that I added at least one open issue what I consider a really important one aka wee need to fix that before we can even think about a release of Plone 5.1 !
I am speaking here about: #881.
Currently we have no docs about how to upgrade from 5.x to 5.1.
Even if it may not much work to add it, we still not have it.
Me personally will try to finish the docker docs, so that we finally have that in our docs and also can announce our docker container on plone.org/download.
Besides fixing and writing documentation there is also some work needed to improve the way how we embed robot tests into papyrus.
Further on I would like to give a first preview about the way how we should/will test, deploy and host docs.plone.org and possible training.plone.org in the future and what is needed to get there.
One last thing, I also will introduce henry, your helping hand for working on our docs locally.
In case you haven't read the full report, I recommend it for its greater detail on and complete listing of the work that was done by sprinters, links to video recordings of presentations given, and for the lovely write up of the human (yes, Plone people are human!) aspects of this very thoughtfully planned sprint.
