andreasma at Free Software and other topics
I worked a bit further on some smaller improvements of the Plone addons that drives the current LibreOffice extensions and templates website during my spare time in the evening of the last days. Once I finished some more of this tweaks I’ll publish new releases of this Plone addons.
Let’s see, if someone would be willing to update the website with this new releases.
I worked on a new release of the Plone addon for the current LibreOffice templates website. It will contain a new module for small template projects, which make it fast and easy to create and submit a new templates project and publish a LibreOffice template. I’m going to release this release during the next days.
It will need the support of a member of the Document Foundation admin team to provide the improvements to the user of the website.
I worked on some further improvements of the Plone addon that drives the current LibreOffice extensions website. I could especially improve the search feature and the listing of the extension projects. I published a new release of the addon with the improvements on the ‚Cheeseshop‘ today (release 0.29).
I finished my work on the implementation of a new module and new features for the Plone addon that drives the current LibreOffice extensions website. The addon contains the new module for small extension projects which makes it easy and fast to submit a new LibreOffice extension. The release is published in the ‚Cheeseshop‘ (https://pypi.org) at: https://pypi.org/project/tdf.extensionuploadcenter/. It is release 0.28 of the Plone addon.
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).
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.
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 ;-(
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.
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.
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.