Slides from the 2008 Plone conference, detailing the process of running the OOTB project and lessons learned.

1. OOTB Theming
Project
Cat-herding for Plone:
Organizing and Executing a
Successful Remote Sprint

2. Veda Williams
• Plone Skinner for ONE/Northwest
• 2 1/2 years of experience in Plone
• I have implemented more than 40+
Plone themes
• Plone skinning training - Naples ’07
• Active in making UI improvements to
plone.org, etc.

3. Plone Strategic
Planning Summit
February 2008
• Goal: to produce a plan for the
strategic future of Plone
• Result: ~50 “champion topics” chosen
and assigned to owners

4. The directive:
Ship with more themes OOTB
• Possibly organize theme sprints if/when
Deliverance is delivered ;)*
• Suggested champion: Veda Williams
*Smiley face guilt trip from Alexander Limi

5. Cat-herding:
What it means to be a champion
• A champion is the person responsible for moving a
focus area forward, and reporting progress.
•
Being a champion does *not* imply that he/she is
going to do the actual work — it's about being the
responsible person for that focus area. Of course,
there are cases where the champion is in fact the
person that implements the solution too.

6. Why Me?
Someone apparently thought I knew
how to herd cats

7. “The cat needs a job”
And apparently someone thought
I had free time on my hands

8. What was the *real*
objective here?
•“Shipping” themes with Plone implied
additional functionality to be added to the
installer
•Deliverance was in a fairly raw state

9. What About Deliverance?
People were talking about it like it was the next big thing

10. When in reality, it looked something like this...

11. The real problem in asking
me to lead the charge?

12. I had never skinned a 3.0 site.

13. What was really going on out in the
theming community?

14. The Theming Story
(February 2008)
• Bar to entry: HIGH
• Documentation: LOW or NONEXISTENT
• Number of active themers: UNKNOWN
• Deliverance: SCARY

16. The Revised Challenge
• Create more 3.0 themes
• Alleviate the day to day pain for
themers
But what did this look like in practice?

17. Generate more themes for 3.0

18. Identify best practices

19. Identify gaps in knowledge

20. Use the collected
information to lower the
bar of difficulty

21. Improve the UI on
plone.org to make the
themes more findable

22. ...and ultimately?

23. Figure out how to let skinners
sleep peacefully through the night

24. Starting a Rolling Sprint

25. OpenPlans planning site
(still open for business)
• http://www.openplans.org/projects/
ootb-plone-themes/
• Recruiting was understated -- 2 or 3
emails to the plone users or UI lists
• Recruiting was mostly viral

26. Project Structure
• Milestone-based
• Assignment of themes
• QA phase
• Rework
• Deployment on plone.org & pypi
• Scattershot approach
• Throw the project out there and hope
people will contribute

27. The Scattershot Approach
World of Warcraft:
“A short range shot that deals 50%
weapon damage and disorients the target
for 4 seconds.”
Which amounts to something like this...

28. • No one dies.
• Sometimes you hit your target.

29. “Hard” Metrics for
Gauging Success
• # of participants
• # of themes
• Email traffic
• Installer improvements
• UI changes to Plone.org

30. Number of Participants
• 49 members
• 10 active contributors of themes
• ~25 contributors to the discussion
• New members rolling in every week
• The project took on a life of its own

31. “We even got our own
secret handshake”

32. Contribution rate
• 20% contribution level to themes
• 50% contribution level to the
discussion

33. Number of Themes
• 66 total Plone themes listed on
plone.org as of September 30, 2008
• 10 themes from the OOTB project
made available on plone.org
• 5 themes available for download from
PyPi or the Collective
• 1 theme used for the new TTW book

34. You do the math.
~25% of the 3.0 themes on Plone.org
are from the OOTB project or have been
used for Plone training

35. Email Traffic
• 65 unique threads
• 300+ emails exchanged in a 10 month
period

36. Email trends
• Marked drop in participation after the
first milestone sprint
• Lower response rates to emails
• Feedback from the group at the end?

38. Thoughts on Email Exchange
• Initial questions were satisfactorily
answered early on through email
exchange
• Many of the conversations happening
on the OOTB list belonged on the UI
list for Plone
• To compensate for not exposing these
conversations to the world at large,
lessons learned need to get translated
back to plone.org/documentation

39. Installer Improvements
• Kudos to Steve McMahon
• As of Plone 3.1.4, all* dependencies are
satisfied by simply installing Plone.
• Not sure what the status is of Windows
installers.
*almost all

40. UI Changes to Plone.org
• Design revisions have been approved by
Alexander Limi
http://www.openplans.org/projects/ootb-plone-themes/round-one
• Plone.org 3.0 migration is not yet complete,
but we have a test bed
• Steve McMahon will implement the changes
• Designer of new plone.org UI is working
these changes into the new design

41. Knowledge Transfer

42. Key Email Threads
(Future discussions of this nature
should be taken into the UI list at large;
OOTB list will be specific to OOTB
theming process only.)

43. What’s the best way to
override a stylesheet?

44. • Paster recipe does this via empty
stylesheets
• Initial conversations on the OOTB list
indicated that overriding should be
done via cssregistry.xml
• Further off-line discussions indicated
that using empty stylesheets allows
more than one Plone theme to be
applied; cssregistry.xml is Zope-wide

45. When and how do we use
the browser/ folder?

46. • Most themers supported using the
skins directory, and leaving the
browser folder images and stylesheets
options available “in case” they are
ever needed
• OOTB recipe was created by Trey Beck
to use only the skins directory for
images and stylesheets, but not widely
distributed. (I use this.)

47. “My dream would be to have ZopeSkel
generate an empty plone product (nested
python namespace, with basic zcml and
__init__.py only, just like the 'plone'
ZopeSkel template), and then to be able to
inject the code needed for creating a skin
directory (registered with portal_skins), or
a zope 3 resource style image declaration,
or a zope 3 skin layer, or the base code for a
viewlet.”
-- David Convent

48. “... why not to add one more question to
theme's generation process like quot;Generate
stylesheets and images as browser
resources?quot;. This would let people like me
who want to use DTML in stylesheets and
store all the theme's mess ;) in skins/
without need of removing browser
resources. If people answer [Yes] - we
generate the skeleton as it is right now. If
we one answers [No] we generate main.css
in skins/SUBFOLDER and do not generate
browser resources.”
-- Denys Mishunov

49. “This also highlights the urgency
(expressed many times already) of unifying
the two approaches to visual customisation
and scoping out the role of Deliverance in
lifting aspects of theming out of this murky
world and into something with a much
shorter tool chain.”
-- Martin Aspeli

50. Can we integrate the
Sub-skins product with
CSS Manager tool?

51. • Reminded us of the frequently
requested “subsite” feature
• Highlighted the push towards tool
integration (paster + subskins + CSS
Manager + gloworm = Deliverance??)

52. What about DTML
Support?

53. • Stylesheets generated in a theme
product should support DTML by
default
• Currently no stylesheets are added to
the skins/stylesheets folder, and new
users may not know how to use DTML

54. Is it ok to modify
main_template?

55. • Use viewlets if at all possible, but yes,
you can still do this.
• I do this, and Limi probably still does. :)
• For the purpose of OOTB themes, keep
these changes to a minimum and
comment your changes

56. How do we publish a
product on plone.org?

57. • Some themes were added to PyPi but
never made it back to plone.org
• Highlighted the need to document this
on plone.org in the “contribution”
section

58. What documentation
does an OOTB theme
product need?

59. • Readme.txt / Install.txt need to cover
dependencies, how to install
• Install.txt not currently generated by
paster recipe, but should be
• Themes by Denys Mishunov contain
great examples of what these could
look like; also documented on the
OOTB site

60. Was OOTB a success?

61. • Creation of 16 themes, or 25% of the
existing 3.0 themes on plone.org
• Significant participation and active
email exchange
• Installer improvements by SteveM
• Plone.org UI changes coming soon!
• Clarity in terms of next steps

62. Side Effects
• Completed theming manual by Anne
Bowtell
• Completed theming chapter with David
Convent for the new TTW book
• I accepted nomination to be editor for the
theming section of Plone.org/
documentation

63. General Observations
• Energy is finite
• Shorter sprints may work better than
a rolling sprint
• Email exchange needs to be exposed
to the broader community
• Interest in the project continues
• The champion is not a bystander in
the process. :)

64. Where are we going from here?

65. • UI improvements to plone.org to
highlight themes are forthcoming
• Documentation gaps have been
identified and will be assigned
• Deliverance work / tool integration
work is happening
• The OOTB project will continue, sans
milestones and with more personal
initiative

66. New Plone Theming Book
(due out in early 2009)

67. Theming Sprint
• October 11 & 12
• Varied topics
• Sprinters welcome!

68. Themes Available for
Selection on plone.org
“Pick me! Pick me!”

69. Simplicity by David Little, 3.0

70. Nonzero by duffyd

71. Intense Simplicity by pigeonflight

72. Busy City by pigeonflight

73. Lazy Days by pigeonflight

74. Bitter Sweet by
Volodomyr Rudnytskyy

75. iCompany theme by
Denys Mishunov

76. Hosting theme by
Denys Mishunov

77. Andreas01 by Speedbreeze

78. Python by Speedbreeze

79. Relic by Speedbreeze

80. Green Community

81. HedDex Greenfield Theme by
Michael Krishtopa

82. Andreas09 by
David Convent & Veda Williams

83. CHZenLike by Christoph Handl

84. Hamnavoe by David LLittle

85. Image Credits
• explodingdog.com drawings
• Texas Monthly and Dick Cheney
• Serta Mattresses
• Southern Culture on the Skids
• http://www.monsterevo.co.uk (tumbleweed)
• Tiger Temple Thailand

86. Let’s Celebrate!
“I think your cat is drunk.”