New Website, New Plone

Like the cobbler’s children who have no shoes, Jazkarta’s website was long overdue for some major work. We began working on a redesign last winter – some modest improvements that morphed into more major changes. When we were ready to move into development in the spring, the Plone 5 release was in beta, so we took the plunge and used this new and shiny Plone on our new website. We’re glad we did! We lived through some growing pains in the early months, but the software got more and more solid as the summer progressed. Plone 5 was officially released just weeks before our new website launched in October, so we have 2 things to celebrate.

Years in the making, this new version of “the ultimate open source CMS” has many, many improvements over its predecessors. A few high points:

• Out-of-the-box responsive and improved tools for custom theming, including LESS integration (a big win for us since responsiveness was a high priority)
• An improved content editing experience with a new toolbar, bulk editing, and TinyMCE 4
• A new templating engine (Chameleon) which gives improved performance
• Automatic CSRF (cross-site request forgery) protection
• Improved accessibility, as described in a previous post
• A new event type that supports all day, open ended, and recurring events
• A full transition to the new “Dexterity” content type framework including support for migration of old content – better for editors (through-the-web customization) and better for developers (reusable behaviors)

And of course it’s still 100% open source and developed by our favorite community of volunteers. You can read all the details at plone.com/5.

So check out our new website! We especially like our new projects page, our sliders for related items, and the flexibility of our tiled landing pages. A huge thank you to the team that created it!