Rural Sprinting: Two New Plone Add-ons and Progress on Python 3

We returned to my house in rural Massachusetts for our annual sprint this year and had a great time sampling local beers and ciders,

eating big meals together,

admiring the Milky Way,

and working on some fun projects. Normally we work remotely – everyone in their own home office, spread across 3 countries and 2 continents. But it’s really nice to get together in person, and we try to do it once a year.

Here’s what we worked on.

Witek and Alec created 2 new Plone add-ons and released them to Pypi.

• jazkarta.abtesttile Provides a new Mosaic tile type that can be used for A/B testing parts of a page layout. Managers can define 2 rich text fields on one tile, and a ratio for how often each should be displayed (for example, 70%/30% or 50%/50%). Plone will randomly show users one field or the other in that ratio. Managers can optionally specify Javascript snippets for use in analytics tracking. Managers can also optionally enable a query string variable, which is added in the rendered HTML to links in the rich text fields. This will indicate whether option A’s or B’s rich text was the source of a page visit. A custom permission allows usage of the add-on to be restricted to privileged users.
• collective.siteimprove Provides integration with siteimprove.com. There is a control panel for requesting and saving a siteimprove.com token that registers the domain with Siteimprove. (You must first sign up for a Siteimprove account.) A Siteimprove button is shown to authorized users on all default views. Publicly visible content shows authorized users a Siteimprove recheck action in the Plone toolbar that checks the individual page. This add-on is essentially done but untested since we have not yet met with the Siteimprove sales person who will provide an account for us to test with. We hope to be able to do that next week.

David, Matthew and Jesse decided to contribute to the ongoing effort to port Plone – Python’s open source enterprise CMS – to Python 3. They were in the porting groove because we recently ported our Dallinger project to Python 3. They made some good progress:

• David made it possible to run Plone tests without including Archetypes, so that developers can run the tests in Python 3 without worrying about porting Plone’s old content type system. After that he investigated why cookies on Python 3 are preventing logins from staying logged in. He traced it to PAS and create a branch with all tests passing on both Python 2 and 3. Hopefully it will get merged during the Halle sprint this week.
• Matthew found and fixed some Chameleon problems. This included an old error that had nothing to do with Python 3 where Chameleon puts spurious context into error messages. He also converted plone.namedfile to Python 3 and fixed some tests in plone.protect (CSRF protection). His work resulted in a fairly large pull request, which was approved and merged.
• Jesse got all tests running for plone.app.workflow and made a bit of progress on the test failures for plone.app.dexterity.

Thanks to all these fixes, we got to the point of being able to save a Plone page on Python 3 and it “sort of” works. (At least it didn’t give an error!)

David also did some evaluation of plone-react with Nate. This is a React-based front-end for Plone that is built on plone.restapi. It’s in early stages of development but looks promising. In the process, Nate ran into a bug in Plone’s unified installer, tested it in Plone 5.1.2 and and filed a ticket for it. Back to his Plone roots!