The 2023 editon of the anual Plone conference happend from October 2nd to 8th in Eibar, Basque Country

The kitconcept team was present with 8 developers. Our team members gave plenty talks, keynotes and trainings.

kitconcept and friends having team dinner

Trainings

Two days filled with trainings. Free for all conference attendees. This offer is unique in the Plone community and kitconcept team members were the backbone of the trainings about how to use Plone 6. From deployment to development to deep insides into how Volto and Plone 6 works.

Alok Kumar, Jakob Kahl: Volto and React

Alok Kumar and Jakob Kahl did a two day training to help developers get started with Volto and React:

https://2023.ploneconf.org/schedule/training/volto-and-react

Check out their trainings online if you want to catch up:

• React Training

• Volto Hands-On Training

Érico Andrei : Installing Plone

Our colleague Érico Andrei gave a training about installing Plone on Day 2, the 3rd of October

https://2023.ploneconf.org/schedule/training/installing-plone

Víctor Fernandez de Alba, Tiberiu Ichim: Effective Volto

Víctor Fernandez de Alba is kitconcept CTO and the Volto Release Manager. Tiberiu Ichim is a Volto team member and one of the key contributors to Volto. They gave key insights into how to work effectively with Volto. If you have experience with Volto and you want to become a real pro, this is the training you should go to.

https://2023.ploneconf.org/schedule/training/effective-volto

https://training.plone.org/effective-volto/index.html

Day One

On day one, kitconcept team members presented two talks, including the main keynote of the day.

Keynote State of Plone

Team members Érico Andrei, Víctor Fernández de Alba and Timo Stollenwerk together with Maurits van Rees of Zest Software and Eric Steele of Salesforce presented the very first Keynote of the Conference titled “State of Plone”.

Breaking boundaries: Plone as headless CMS by Víctor Fernández de Alba

Our colleague Víctor Fernández de Alba gave a presentation about the challenges faced by the Plone content management system in keeping up with modern frontend developments and the growing popularity of headless CMSs.

Breaking boundaries: Plone as headless CMS

https://2023.ploneconf.org/schedule/breaking-boundaries-plone-as-headless-cms

Day Two

Day Two was a informative Day, packed with interesting Talks, Panels and Presentations.

Volto Team Meeting

Panel: The Future of Search in Plone, 2023 Edition

Timo Stollenwerk, Sally Kleinfeldt, Tiberiu Ichim,, Eric Steele, Eric Bréhault, Rikupekka Oksanen, Érico Andrei and Guido Stevens hosted a very interesting Panel about the Future of Search Algorithms in Plone.

This panel provided a brief history and modern examples of Plone search, followed by a discussion of what improvements are needed - both from a marketing and technical perspective. This topic was first discussed at the 2011 conference and it was interesting to see how opinions had changed.

Alok Kumar : Is your Volto addon developer friendly ?

Meanwhile, kitconcept frontend developer Alok Kumar held a Presentation about what makes a developer friendly Volto Addon, and how we as a developer ourselfes can improve on the way we develop addons for Volto.

https://2023.ploneconf.org/schedule/is-your-volto-addon-developer-friendly

Rob Gietema : How to build a site using Nick

Later in the afternoon kitconcept developer Rob Gietema held an intriguing Talk about Nick, a headless CMS written in Node.js and how easy it is to build a website with it.

https://2023.ploneconf.org/schedule/how-to-build-a-site-using-nick

David Glick : Tales from a production Plone Cluster

Following Rob, kitconcept Employee David Glick shared some Details and Stories on hosting large Plone sites in a Docker Swarm Cluster.

https://2023.ploneconf.org/schedule/tales-from-a-production-plone-cluster

Érico Andrei : Unlocking the Power of plone.distribution : A Hands-On Guide

In this talk, Érico Andrei guided us through the feature-rich world of Plone Distributions.

https://2023.ploneconf.org/schedule/unlocking-the-power-of-plone-distribution-a-hands-on-guide

Local sport showcase and party

In the evening CodeSyntax organized a showcase of different local sports, including stone lifting, wood chopping and wood sawing. Timo represented kitconcept in this together with Phillip Bauer of Starzel. After that we concluded the day with cold drinks and Pinxos at the conference party.

Day 3

Day 3 was filled with quite technical presentations, providing Information on the Cutting Edge Technology Plone has to offer.

Fred van Dijk : How the Plone Foundation Ai.team manages its websites with CI/CD

On the third Day of the Plone Conference, kitconcept Employee Fred van Dijk shared the News on automating a plone Release and how to host and operate a small Docker Swarm cluster using Plone.

https://2023.ploneconf.org/schedule/how-the-plone-foundation-ai-team-manages-its-websites-with-ci-cd

Víctor Fernández de Alba : volto-light-theme: Volto Theming, Reimagined

After a quick coffee break Víctor Fernández de Alba shared the progress on the Volto-Light-Theme and its inner workings.

https://2023.ploneconf.org/schedule/volto-light-theme-volto-theming-in-2023

Timo Stollenwerk : How we built the Website for the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in less than six months

CEO Timo Stollenwerk indulged us in the Story of the Challenges of migrating large, goverment-owned websites into a Plone project.

https://2023.ploneconf.org/schedule/how-we-built-the-website-for-the-german-aerospace-center-dlr-in-less-than-six-months

Érico Andrei : Testing your Plone codebase with Pytest

A little later in the afternoon, Érico Andrei presented us with a better, improved way to test Plone codebases.

https://2023.ploneconf.org/schedule/testing-your-plone-codebase-with-pytest

Rohit Kumar : Workflow Manager with Volto

In his presentation Rohit Kumar shared the progress regarding implementing a visual workflow Manager in Volto.

https://2023.ploneconf.org/schedule/workflow-manager-in-volto

Summary

The kitconcept team continues to drive innovation in the Plone community. Volto is the default frontend for Plone 6 and dominated the topics during the conference. We are happy to be part of such an amazing community.

The 2022 editon of the anual Plone conference happend from October 10th to 16th in Namur, Belgium.

The kitconcept team was present with nine developers. Our team members gave three trainings, two keynotes, and six talks.

The kitconcept team in action at #ploneconf2022. pic.twitter.com/wQV4qeVCxB

— kitconcept (@kitconcept_gmbh) October 13, 2022

Trainings

Two days filled with trainings. Free for all conference attendees. This offer is unique in the Plone community and kitconcept team members were the backbone of the trainings about how to use Plone 6. From deployment to development to deep insides into how Volto and Plone 6 works.

Alok Kumar, Jakob Kahl: Volto and React

Alok Kumar and Jakob Kahl did a two day training to help developers get started with Volto and React:

https://2022.ploneconf.org/schedule/training/volto-and-react

Check out their trainings online if you want to catch up:

• React Training
• Volto Hands-On Training

Érico Andrei, Jens Klein: Installing Plone

Our colleague Érico Andrei gave a training about installing Plone with Jens Klein on day one about how to install Plone:

https://2022.ploneconf.org/schedule/training/installing-plone

Victor Fernandez de Alba, Tiberiu Ichim: Effective Volto

Victor Fernandez de Alba is kitconcept CTO and the Volto Release Manager. Tiberiu Ichim is a Volto team member and one of the key contributors to Volto. They gave key insights into how to work effectively with Volto. If you have experience with Volto and you want to become a real pro, this is the training you should go to.

https://2022.ploneconf.org/schedule/training/effective-volto

https://training.plone.org/2022/effective-volto/index.html

Day One

On day one, kitconcept team members presented three talks, including the main keynote of the day.

Keynote Érico Andrei

Plone Foundation president, and our teammate, Érico Andrei kicked off the first day of the conference with a keynote about the Plone community.

Case Study by Timo Stollenwerk

kitconcept CEO Timo Stollenwerk presented a case study about how kitconcept relaunched hundreds of websites with the Plone 6 stack.

Plone at Scale: How Plone Powers Hundreds of Websites at one of the Largest Research Institutions in Europe

Alok Kumar

Alok Kumar presented “A Deep Dive Into Internals Of Volto” where he explained the different configuration options in Volto.

Day Two

Plone 6 beyond 2022

Volto Release Manager Victor Fernandez de Alba presented the roadmap for Plone 6 and Volto beyond 2022.

https://2022.ploneconf.org/schedule/talks/plone-6-beyond-2022

David Glick: The past, present, and future of how we test Plone

https://2022.ploneconf.org/schedule/talks/the-past-present-and-future-of-how-we-test-plone

Érico Andrei: Brazil still loves Plone

30 Million visitors on a single day. 670k content objects. If you are running a Plone site at scale you definitely want Érico Andrei on your team. He helped the Electoral Justice department in Brazil to run and scale Plone for the upcoming elections.

https://2022.ploneconf.org/schedule/talks/brazil-still-loves-plone

Rob Gietema: Nick: A Nearly Headless CMS

Rob Gietema started plone-react together with Roel Bruggink at the Beethoven Sprint 2017 in Bonn at the kitconcept office. This first became Volto and later Plone 6.

For Rob, this isn’t enough. Check out his latest “pet project” Nick CMS. A NodeJS-based CMS headless CMS backend that works flawlessly with Volto.

https://2022.ploneconf.org/schedule/talks/nick-a-nearly-headless-cms

Day 3

Timo Stollenwerk, Victor Fernandez de Alba: State of Plone

Plone Release Managers Maurits van Rees, Eric Steele, Victor Fernández de Alba, and Timo Stollenwerk started day three of the Plone Conference with the third keynote about “The State of Plone”:

https://2022.ploneconf.org/schedule/talks/state-of-plone

Summary

The kitconcept team continues to drive innovation in the Plone community. Volto is the default frontend for Plone 6 and dominates the topics during the conference. We are happy to be part of such an amazing community.

Volto continues to innovate at a fast pace towards Plone 6. Today we released another major milestone on our road to Plone 6: Volto 14.

Volto 14 was in the making since September 2021 and it is in active use in various projects at Eau de Web, Red Turtle, Rohberg, kitconcept, and others.

Volto 14 comes with a set of new exiting features: a new search block that supports faceted search, locking support, a new seamless mode that makes deploying Volto easier, a new mobile navigation and support for Node 16.

Faceted Search Block

The new search block allows editor to create sophisticated faceted searches through the web without writing a single line of code.

Editors can define criteria for the content that is listed, like in the existing listing block in Volto.

Then editors can then choose arbitrary facets that are displayed to the users to choose from to narrow down the search.

Locking

Locking in a Content Management System is a mechanism to prevent users from accidentially overriding each others changes.

When a user edits a content object in Plone, the object is locked until the user hits the save or cancel button. If a second user tries to edit the object at the same time, she will see a message that this object is locked.

Content object in Volto 14 that is locked by another user

Locking requires at least plone.restapi 8.9.0 or plone.restapi 7.4.0 to be installed.

Seamless Mode

The new “seamless mode” allows zero configuration deployment by avoiding hardcoded environment variables in builds involved, and establishing good sensible defaults when setting up deployments (and also in development). So the developer/devOps doesn’t have to overthink their setups.

These are its main features:

• Runtime environment variables
• Unified traversal ++api++
• Use Host header to auto-configure the API_PATH

and these immediate benefits:

• Avoid having to expose and publish the classic UI if you don’t really need it
• If possible, avoid having to rewrite all API responses, since it returns paths that do not correspond to the original object handled and “seen” from Volto, so you have to adjust them (via a code helper) in a lot of call responses.
• Simplify Docker builds, making all the configuration via the runtime environment variables

Seamless Mode requires at least plone.rest 2.0.0a1 to be installed.

New Mobile Navigation

We polished the mobile navigation for Volto 14 to improve the user experience on mobile.

New mobile navigation in action on the Plone Conference 2021 website

Node 16

Volto 16 will support Node 16 in addition to Node 14 and Node 12. Node 16 will receive security updates until April 2024.

Node 16 release schedule from nodejs.org

Plone 6

Volto 14 is an important step towards Plone 6. Volto 15 will switch the default editor from DraftJS to Slate editor and it is planned to be ready in Q1/Q2 2022. This is the last big step for Volto before Plone 6 can be released.

Two weeks ago we cut two important releases on the road to Plone 6. Plone REST API 7 introduces a new link integrity feature for blocks-based pages. Volto 12 improves the add-on ecosystem by introducing a new configuration registry to avoid circular dependencies.

Photo by Stephen Leonardi on Unsplash

Plone REST API 7

Linking pages is one of the core idea of the world wide web. Keeping links within a website intact is therefore one of the core features that any Content Management System needs to provide.

One of the core features of Plone has always been that editors can copy and move single pages as well as large content trees without breaking internal links to other parts of the site. This is accomplished by using unigue IDs (UUIDs) instead of relative or absolute paths when adding a link to another page. Plone uses “portal transforms” internally to rewrite those links in RichText fields on save operations.

Plone 6 (aka Volto) introduces blocks-based page layouts, that store a JSON structure internally instead of HTML. This more structured way of storing page content and layout allows more complex page layouts. Though, because of this change, the existing portal transforms mechanism that rewrites links to UUIDs did not work any longer.

Blocks-based Volto page in edit mode (with kitconcept-blocks-grid)

Werkbank, a Plone agency from Bochum, Germany, stepped up to sponsor the development of link integrity in 2020, since they needed that for a client project.

I started to draft a possible solution and wrote a first prototype. Thomas Buchenberger from 4teamwork picked up that work at the Plone Conference sprint in Ferrara, Italy.

Andrea Cecchi from RedTurtle joined our efforts and refactored the resolveUID algorithm into a blocks transformer, that we started to use for other use cases and that made the resolveUID transformer more generic and flexible.

After that, we cut a first plone.restapi 7 alpha release and entered a longer period of quality assurance and testing.

Two weeks ago, after we tested the new feature in multiple projects at kitconcept, I cut a final release of Plone REST API 7.

After the first alpha release, the ResolveUID transformation was added to links and images. In addition plone.restapi 7 comes with a new blocks serialization mechanism and an important fix that makes sure files are opened directly by Plone for anonymous users.

We also added a “smart fields” concept that allows integrators to mark a blocks field as searchableText field.

A new @contextnavigation endpoint was added that allows for local navigations. We enhanced the navigation endpoint to expose an optional navigation title (“nav_title”) field.

Since the final 7 release, we cut six more releases and REST API 7 was included in Plone 5.2.4 release.

Volto 12

Photo by Gaelle Marcel on Unsplash

Tiberiu and Victor worked on a new Volto configuration registry which is the new central point to store and retrieve Volto configurations. The configuration registry is a singleton that ensures a setting only exists once. With more an more Volto add-ons that started to depend on each other, we started to run into circular dependencies issues that we can avoid now with the new configuration registry.

You can find more details about it in the Volto docs and in the Volto 12 upgrade guide.

Plone 6

Plone REST API 7 and Volto 12 were two very important releases on our road to Plone 6.

We plan to cut another Plone REST API 8 branch and release for Plone 6, which will support Python 3 only.

Volto will continue to move at very high pace towards Plone 6. We started to organize a series of Plone 6 “Micro-Sprints” to push things further.

Check out the Volto Roadmap on github for more details.