[Zope-CMF] Re: CMF 2.1 release schedule

[Hanno Schlichting]

Hi.

Jens Vagelpohl wrote:
> 
> I was under the impression there were a few "show-stoppers" that needed
> CMF 2.1 (and in some cases Five) support that weren't there yet, like
> the "customize a skin item". Are there any items you know are missing?
> You seem to apply you have everything you need.

The current state of the CMF 2.1 support for Plone 3.0 is simply at the
it-works level. That is, I made all those changes that where required to
get all tests passing again.

The major change here was porting all actions related code to the new
IAction and IActionCategory code, which was especially painful for our
huge amount of migration code.

The second major change was porting quite some amount of code for
registering new content types to be based on GenericSetup profiles, as I
found this to be the only reliable way to register new types.

Regarding the skin customizations our current strategy is to write views
in pure file-system based code without a way to customize these TTW and
have the page templates as usual skin items with customize support.
While this isn't ideal we are currently mainly moving code out of tools
into views and utilities. Both of these increase the ability to make
customizations compared to the former state of having to replace
complete tools.

> Looking at http://www.zope.org/Products/CMF/docs/roadmap there are quite
> a few items we were hoping to get in that aren't finished yet.

OK, to be honest: None of the items in the CMF roadmap are crucial to
the next Plone release in any way. So for the three remaining items:

Eggs
----
As we won't be able to move Plone to be completely egg-based we do not
need CMF to be either. But of course we want to make as much of Plone
available as an egg as possible in the future, maybe in the next release
which is planned for autumn 2007 (Plone 3.0 final is scheduled for late
March 2007). Note that this is however not a priority as we depend on
quite some external binaries, so we won't be able to do a pure egg-based
install anyways.

Zope3 views
-----------
Having good Zope3 views in CMF would be nice as it would eventually
enable us to re-use some of these again. But honestly right now we do
not use any of the content types from CMF anymore apart from being based
on the PortalContent base class. We do not use any of the skin layers
from CMF and the only skin script we still use is the titleOrId script
which is more than trivial. So having views on the CMF level might open
up a possibility to re-use some of them again, but whether or not these
are present does not have any immediate effect on Plone.

Events
------
This is the only item that has a direct effect on our code. The
extremely ugly way we dealt with the added events and removed manage*
methods so far is to copy over the manage* methods to Archetypes
instead, as we cannot break all dependent products without concrete
deprecation warnings and nobody had the time to add proper events
support to Archetypes so far. This resulted in a even more insane
cataloging behavior of Archetypes which we circumvented by looking if an
object is already in a catalog before indexing it and looking if it is
still there before unindexing it. Reindexing objects still takes place
quite some times.

As the amount of people working on Archetypes right now is fairly
limited, I guess we will deal with most other events in the same manner.
While this is ugly it was the only way to get Archetypes working with
CMF 2.1 so far. So while more events are theoretically nice, we won't
take advantage of them right now.

Some of the above might only be my personal opinion and I'll let others
jump in if they have a different point of view :)

Yours,
Hanno

P.S. We'll hopefully meet in St. Augustin next week ;)