Autor: Andreas Mantke

Plone Only For Large Scale And For Big Company?

I read in the minutes from a board meeting of The Document Foundation (TDF) the belief ‚plone is a CMS for large scale & for a big company etc.‘ and ‚there perhaps suitable‘. This seemed to be a lonesome view from the leading body of this entity and not generally shared.

If you take a look at the website https://plone.com you will find there a list of recent Plone launches for organizations and companies. This organizations / companies and the Plone launches are very divers and from small to big sizes, e.g.:

And I found another interesting site for volunteers, that is created with Plone and its new technics: https://vhs-ehrenamtsportal.de/

Thus the view of the TDF board proofs wrong.

The organizations and companies which launched and use Plone site benefit from the excellent stability of this Content Management System (CMS) (information about Plone security could be found at: https://plone.org/security).

LibreOffice And QA

It seemed the personal ressources for quality assurance in the LibreOffice project are not enough to even get all UI changes tested. There is an issue with not localized string in a user dialog of the Writer module. If you choose ‚Einfügen – Verzeichnis -Verzeichnis‘ you will find in the dialog a drop down box for ‚Typ‘, that includes only strings in the English language. And even the entry ‚Typ‘ in front of the box is not localized.

Dialog Verzeichnis – Verzeichnis

LibreOffice Extensions Upload Center – New Small Modul

I worked a bit more on the Plone addon for the current LibreOffice extensions and templates center and added a first draft for a new module.  This new small module would make it possible to create a new extension project and add an extension file within one step using one form. I commited my changes to the TDF Github repository: https://github.com/tdf/tdf.extensionuploadcenter

I’ll work further on this draft during the next days. Possibly a member of the TDF admin team will take care of the update of the LibreOffice extensions and templates site with the improvements.

LibreOffice Extension And Templates Website Code

The source code which drives the current LibreOffice extensions and templates website is available for checkout and development on Github.com in a public repository (https://github.com/tdf/extensions.libreoffice.org). It’s easy to checkout the code from there and run a test site or development site yourself. There is nothing hidden. It’s a Plone site with some add-ons including a policy package and a theming package. You need only to run the usual buildout.

Complaining About A Bus Factor

I learned from work inside an open source project during the last years that many people are not willing to really support you, while you are doing the work. They show nearly no interest in your volunteer work up to the point when something didn’t went smoothly. During the periode everything went smoothly you won’t get an acclamation. But in the opposite you will see a lot of people always pointing on you. And maybe they pick on you. I got this experience. And there were nobody inside the project who stopped this.

At some point leading members of the project spoke about my volunteer work in public without discussing requests and issues first with the one who did the work (me). That was the last straw.

I stopped my contribution to the project immediately. I wanted to preserve my nerves and spent my spare time in a different way after 16 years.

There is no need to complain on a bus factor, if you are the source of it.

And I read that the project will spent more donation money on the creation of a new framework and administration. It seemed the current one was to cheap because of my contributions (volunteer time). Lesson learned: only expensive things seemed to be invaluable ;-(

Why Not Mind One’s Own Business?

There were a new graphic published on the blog that points on the International Women’s Day. The author gave hints how to forge a more gender-balanced world

I had a look at the structure of the organization behind this blog entry and maybe it would be a good idea to start within the own organization. There is / are:

  • only one woman among nine men in its board,
  • only one woman among four men in the membership committee,
  • only one woman among six male staff members,
  • only two women among twenty two male members of the Engeneering Steering Committee,
  • only two women among fifty three male certified developers.

LibreOffice Extensions Site: Why The Latest Software Isn’t In Use?

The LibreOffice extensions and templates website runs on Plone 5.0.x with some addons. I created this addons from scratch a time ago and improved them over the time. E.g. the current release number of the addon for the extension part of the site is 0.26. There is also a release 0.27 on TDF’s Github repository. The development version is currently 0.28.

The LibreOffice extensions site uses instead of the current version only the old version 0.25-dev, which is three releases behind the current development state. The reason behind this is that there is nobody in the TDF infrastructure team who takes care of the site and is able or willing to run the Plone buildout script to update the software that runs the site.

I had done this work for TDF in the past, but I felt from the way of communication from leading members of TDF that my volunteer work was no longer wanted. Thus I decided to spent my spare time for other tasks not releated to TDF, where I get much more positive feedback.

And a look at the latest published extensions confirmed that there is currently nobody taking a look into them, e.g. making a review. It seemed they  were only published.

Migration Of Plone Site Content

If you want to migrate content from or to a Plone site it is always the best use of ressources, if you ask volunteers to copy and paste the content items from one environment to another ;-(

But seriously: The Plone community created a tool for such tasks with a funny name: ‚Transmogrifier‘. You could find some information on this at https://docs.plone.org/external/collective.transmogrifier/docs/source/index.html#transmogrifier and a training session at https://training.plone.org/5/transmogrifier/.

But it is not that easy and fast to create pipelines and blueprints for a migration yourself. Thus I recommend to ask and pay a Plone professional service to do the migration. It would preserve your nerves and you get results very fast.

TDF Dashboard

I tried to have a look onto the TDF dashboard at https://dashboard.documentfoundation.org using an Internet Explorer 11, but with no success. The website didn’t render. I got only a retry of rendering actions. According to the browser stats at least 5.26 % of the internet user are not able to view the site (https://www.stetic.com/de/market-share/browser/).

And in addition for those who prefer webservices with ‚mobile first‘ implementation: it’s not for you ;-(

The site doesn’t render proper on smaller mobile devices. It’s not usable on such devices.

Expensive LibreOffice Extensions And Templates Website?

I read a time ago about the myth of an expensive LibreOffice extensions and templates website. I investigated about this and had a look at the real numbers (they are public available on the wiki page: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/TDF/Ledgers). I found some expenses only in two fiscal period: 2017 and 2018. TDF spent in 2017 6399.44 Euro and in 2018 642.60 Euro. The money was predominantly spent for content migration and an improved server environment. It included also an individual training for the TDF infrastructure team.

The most work on the website was done by volunteer work within some support from the Plone open source community. All in all TDF spent 7042.04 Euro for running the site for about seven and a half years, thus about 938.39 Euro per year. Seemed a very expensive tool in comparison to the financial and personal ressources used for running other TDF tools 😉