As Christmas draws closer, we are proud to announce the first Release Candidate for Plone. If we get positive feedback from this release and migrations are smooth - this will be 1.0! Get the latest Plone from http://plone.org/download and help us locate any remaining bugs. What is Plone? Plone is a Content Management System based on Zope Corporation's Content Management Framework. It combines a stable base with an attractive, lightweight and easy-to-use User Interface, and has quickly become one of the leading Open Source Content Management Systems. What are the differences between the betas and RC1? - Plone comes with an i18n folder with approximately 20 languages (please co-ordinate with the "i18n effort":/development/i18n to add your language). These are pre-installed in the Windows installer package. - Xopus was removed (will possibly be available as an add-on later); we have kept XSDHTMLEditor but will be removing it as 1.1 comes and we can move it to an add-on. - Lots of bug fixes. Small feature enhancements (filename staying in form if validation fails) and usability issues addressed. - migration machinery has been updated and hopefully you should have no problems migrating from any beta release to RC1. - RC1 is being run on plone.org with great results. Near future Plone is gathering a healthy community around it. The focus in the near future will be documentation and a stable 1.0 release. Plone is already being used all over the world for many different purposes. Please mail us at plone-users@lists.sourceforge.net about your experiences. We are now preparing the final announcements, finishing touches and installer integration, and watching the issue collector at http://plone.org/collector for any issues reported. To upgrade - Do a full backup (Both the products dir and Data.fs). - Delete the CMFPlone directory and replace with the new one. - Enter your Plone site via the ZMI (http://myplonesite:8080/manage). - Add a Plone Migration tool if there isn't one displayed already - the name should be portal_migration (Add a Plone Tool -> Migration Tool). - Enter the portal_migration tool and double check that the version displayed is correct (You can override the settings if you know that you have a different version). - Click the "Click here to migrate" link. - Voilá - your Plone site should be up to date. Please report any errors to us. Download and test Download Plone RC1 from http://plone.org/download and help us find any remaining bugs. The final release will hopefully be out by the end of this month, or early next month. We wish everybody a nice holiday, and look forward to making year 2003 the Year of Plone. :) -- Alexander Limi http://limi.net