Plone 6 Roadmap?

Hi, guys.

Do you remember the excitement you feel reading about Plone roadmap? It'll have HTML5 support! z3c.forms! dexterity! diazo! The anticipation was wonderful and you could enjoy the waiting and prepare yourself for the new joys of plone developing. The road map was even better than read "What's new in Python" with each release.

Now, it seems to me it's harder to find an official document with the global vision of what Plone 6 will/should be. We have the 2015 Strategic Summit Document which seems to be the basis of the new roadmap, and of course we have posts of developers working in the new and exciting features.

I understand that developers are busy writing new features. And I understand that certain things haven't been decided yet (hello javascript!). I just want to point out that a well published road map is an excellent galvanizer on how the wonderful thing future will bring us on.

Hi José,

As you said, there are a lot to discuss before we establish this roadmap.

I think the next PloneConf could be a nice opportunity to run this discussion, so maybe we will be able to publish the Plone 6 roadmap after the conference.

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instead of having visions and dreams: concentrate on making the current version mature and production-ready.

-aj

On the conference web site 2016.ploneconf.org/sprints there is a link to a Titanpad where you can add your ideas for a sprint, though perhaps a better way to organize discussion around a roadmap would be an open space, like the ones in Bristol and Bucharest. (Hm, perhaps we need time in the conference schedule for open spaces)

Or perhaps you can submit a "talk" that is more a panel discussion and open Q&A about the roadmap? 2016.ploneconf.org/talks

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So Plone 5 is not mature or production ready?

Is this general acknowledgement from the community, or is it Andreas' opinion?

Is it generally not recommended to use Plone 5 in new deployments yet?

Let's be clear: if using Plone 5 on production was not recommended, Plone 5 would not be released, it would be just a beta.

I use Plone 5 on production since last year, it works very well and it is fully reliable.

We've deployed many Plone 5 sites and it's been great. We just finished a massive deployment based on Plone 5 and it's been great.

We at BlueDynamics Alliance are using Plone 5 for all current and future projects. But we do not push upgrading old Plone 4 sites.

Plone is very mature. If you use it as Plone, the product, and just add a theme and some already upgraded addons all is fine. You may find minor UI glitches. Most of them are reported, waiting for the hero to get fixed. The Javascript integration story is a bit complex, but there are shortcuts to get things done. Plone 5 is what you want. Do not start with 4.

If you go into depth, using Plone, the framework, you may end up doing Core Development work.

We are using Plone in a project with a bunch of custom and folderish types, with Tiles, Blocks and parts of Mosaic, with Lineage multisite setup and AngularJS.
In an other project we are using Multilingual together with custom language fallback indexes, fine grained field level permissions, users as content.
In another project we are again consulting a well known car manufacturer doing there 800+ sites for their distributors again with massive adaption using Lineage, only custom types, special SAML auth and lots of third party service integration.

All this works fine too. It pushed Plone 5 to its limits, bugs or missing features are popping up weekly and Pull Requests against core are more the rule than the exception.

But I really don't want to go back to Plone 4.
5 is much better, easier and faster.

I am looking forward to the upcoming 5.1 release, where again massive work was done, now primary aiming at stability, code cleanup and some new features such as the Actions ControlPanel for improved TTW hackabilty.

There are still some PLIPs open and may get merged before release. If not they will end up in 5.2 or maybe 6.0.

Future plan is to stick more to semantic versioning and so a upcoming major release 6 must not mean it's such a big step as from 4 to 5.

Plone 5 may be production ready but it's obviously not mature and early adopters are experiencing issues already mentioned above in this thread because of that.

that's nothing new or different from what we had in the past: early major releases are always ambitious and most of the time developers can't foresee in advance the issues they are creating when trying to implement an enhancement or a new feature.

I'm not using Plone 5 at all and I'm not recommending it to my customers just for one reason: I have a full set of add-ons that makes me very productive with almost no work at all.

those add-ons have been developed for many years, since the early days of Plone 4.1 and Dexterity 1.0, and I can't afford losing that. I have been working on compatibility issues on spare hours by many months now but I'm far from having finished.

also, my previous experiences as an early adopter of Plone 4.1 and some other technologies (like Dexterity and Diazo) made me a little bit conservative on my vision: I prefer to work with boring technologies, including new things one at a time, as I can't lose money, time or projects anymore.

is Plone 5 for you? I don't know; that's a question that must be answered only by you.

just take one thing into account: all the guys who answered your question above and that are happily using Plone 5 are hardcore core developers with many years of experience and knowledge of new technologies and the inners of their implementation into Plone.

Again: this is typical tunnel view of you Plone core developers.
The Plone 5 backend is rock-solid, the frontend has still many issues.
As so often: you leave out the your target audience: integrators (which should be able to handle the pain) and Plone developers outside the Plone community. In particular I would be concerned about the later group. The hotspot in Plone 5 is - guess what - the integration story with third-party JS code...the current approach is fragile, partly broken and dysfunctionial. Acceptable for a 5.0 but it must be addressed and fixed in 5.1. There has to be a straight forward working way to use arbitrary JS modules in Plone 5.1 without tinkering and praying.

-aj

@alberto: keep in mind that in every community there are different opinions. Some people hate change. Some people can deal with things that work less perfectly than they expect. And often the opinions you hear most often and loudly are the negative ones (of which I'm also guilty of). So for every negative expect there is a lot of unspoken positives who are just getting on with it.

A similar example is the big noise made by Alex Ganor and others a few years back (https://alexgaynor.net/2013/dec/30/about-python-3/) and how python 3 is a mistake and we should just stick with python 2. Where is that debate now? We got over ourselves and python 3 is much more accepted. Zope is even well on its way to being python 3 ready.

Plone 5 is at a similar stage. It works well. The JS story could have been simpler and obviously needs to be better documented but it is not unusable. It would be great to get more constructive feedback on improvements to the JS story.

My company has two sites in production on plone 5 and we are by no means heavy core developers. The most important thing to keep in mind is that although there is a cost in switching to new ways of doing things, if you are starting a new site, there is normally a bigger long term cost in starting with plone 4 due to not having smoother upgrade path and being able to take advantage on new plugins like mosaic, or plugins that start to drop or don't maintain plone 4 support (like wildcard.foldercontents which is no longer updated for plone 4). It really depends on your use case and that is why you can't ask the question "should I use plone 5" and expect to get a simple answer.

As for the original question of publishing a roadmap. I would highly suggest that those finding plone 5 integrator story frustrating put some of their energy into designs and constructive suggestions that could improve that story in upcoming releases. I'd also add that I think plone roadmaps have never really been roadmaps but just an unordered wishlist. It's only the work of those that actually care to make it happen that determine the priority of the actual roadmap (for better or worse), so the order is somewhat random. That is why you won't see a published plone 6 roadmap anytime soon that is meaningful.

However I agree it would very helpful for motivation if a real roadmap did exist, but for that to happen there would have to be a structure for determining "who plone is trying to attract" and "which of it's existing kinds of users should be helped first". Once you have that it becomes more obvious what features should be targeted. Open spaces aren't great for that (I've tried). Strategic summits also haven't produced that. Mailing lists certainly don't produce clear priorities. For me, I've about run out of ideas on how to make that happen. Hopefully someone else can work it out.

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As others pointed out already is more about what the effort is put on rather than having a grand plan that someone will do.

As for what is being worked on: Mosaic and REST API are being actively developed and quite some companies are already using them right now.

Lots of work have been put in cleaning up our stack so we can do a first step in upgrading the versions that are being used and later on start thinking on a python 3 port of it. This is a stretch goal for a Plone 6 probably, depends on how many people jump in and make it happen of course.

There are plenty of other things being worked on, but if you wanted buzzwords, that probably make a good sum already :slight_smile:

Plone 5 is absolutely production ready. I personally have worked on and launched several Plone 5 sites in the past year.

I am not a hardcore core developer... I am an ok programmer but I am mostly a configurator / integrator, and I am lazy.

Hector, you've explained your rationale for sticking for now with P4 and I appreciate that you have a set of tools that work for you.

Andreas has been trying to do some heavy duty programming and he has hit issues that are true of any major new release in which we have had to change the way old versions did them in order to keep up with the current (and quickly evolving) ways of doing this with JavaScript frameworks.

There are a lot of other people who have deployed Plone 5 successfully. They're just not going to get involved in this kind of pissing match because it's just not productive. Help us fix things if you think they're broken. Complaining here and trying to scare off newcomers to Plone or Plone 5 is not useful.

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I didn't want to have this argument again but you asked for it:

it's totally unfair to insinuate that we are not giving constructive feedback or that we're doing nothing to fix the state of things.

I pointed out the need of an updated roadmap two years ago; I opened dozens of bug reports related to Plone 5 about regressions on the toolbar, the resource registries, plone.app.contenttypes and many other things.

as per the Kübler-Ross model, bug reports were first denied and then I was labeled an old-fashioned who didn't want to understand the new and cool way of doing things; slowly some of them have been openly recognized and accepted; sadly, few of them are fixed.

and of course I want to fix those things, if only I have time, resources or money I already had addressed most of them! do you think I don't want to use Plone 5 and share the pride with my customers and colleagues? I want, but I can't if I'm not convinced… and I'm not.

Andreas, BTW, is not doing "some heavy duty programming", he is doing very simple stuff like adding an icon to a content type or some static resources to an add-on, and that's exactly why he's so pissed off.

we are now 5 maintenance releases after Plone 5 and we continue to have such issues; every time I read the answers to some Plone 5 problems I see a community that is always willing to help, but almost never to stop and think why those problems are there in the first place.

some people continue denying the problems and just want to keep moving parts and breaking things down, again… just because it seems to be cool.

sorry guys, but it's time to stop and think about some decisions and technology choices we made in the past for the sake of Plone.

nevertheless there seems to be light at the end of the tunnel: Nathan's new toolbar and Asko's experiments seem to me pointed into the right direction.

https://www.nathanvangheem.com/image-repository/screen-shot-2016-07-23-at-1-26-24-pm.png/@@images/68db579d-9eea-4edd-8133-e63ce9c86831.png

this looks super awesome

-aj

It is different (in a good way) from P5. There are some really nice touches! e.g. when you Add items you can add many items one after the other without leaving the current context. There is a built in recycle bin. The way you upload images, videos, files, audio clips is that they automatically go to a set folder... the user no longer has to think! Still learning my way around it.

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4 posts were split to a new topic: Javascript and the just a bunch of addons ideology