A short lightning talk given at the Boston World Plone Day about the latest new features in Plone 4. New default Sunburst grid-based theme, graphs of Plone's performance improvements, TinyMCE, image sizes, bundled jQuery, configurable registration form, improve group management, blobs for files and images.
31. Download Plone 4.0b2
today!
• http://plone.org/download
• Mac / Windows / Unix installers
Hinweis der Redaktion
modern, minimalist, grid-based theme that’s a better starting point for modern themes.
Plone 4 is going to ship with a new default theme based on the newly redesigned plone.org site. This will affect intranet implementations (which tend to do less custom theming work) than external website implementations.
Plone is getting twice as fast with every release
Compared to Plone 3.3 Plone 4.0 is about 50% faster, ranging from 30% for edit pages up to 70% for anonymous page views. If you use the Chameleon template engine, you get two to three times the speed compared to 3.3.
You get almost double the performance accessing the homepage of the site. I also tried testing it with Chameleon installed (the new template rendering engine in Plone trunk) which gave a speedup of over 2.5 times!
Tiny MCE replaces Kupu as the default WYSIWYG editor. From a user perspective, this is probably the most noticeable change. While a number of number rich text editors are supported through add-on modules (“Products”), Plone has been a bit of an outlier for using Kupu as the default, and best integrated editor. Plone has favored Kupu because of its simplicity and the well formed HTML that it produces. However, users tend to like all the buttons and additional formatting features offered by TinyMCE and FCK. TinyMCE is widely used as the standard editor in many open source and commercial CMSs. Plone will be in good company.
jQuery, the popular AJAX framework is becoming nearly ubiquitous. Now Plone will ship with it bundled into the basic install. From this, I expect to see lots of little UI optimizations in the upcoming releases. Of course this will be balanced with Plone’s emphasis on accessibility.
Plone can be configured to allow users to register to the site and be put into a pending status or become full blown members. 4.0 will have some enhancements to fine tune these configurations with more sophisticated behavior.
Delegated group management: Plone has a good system for managing groups and roles. However, to this point, only a site manager can control group membership. With this release, there can be group owners who manage membership for the groups that they own.