LA Theme Sprint Report

Kudos to Michael Miller and Luke Brannon of the LA Plone Meetup for hosting the first (annual?) Plone Theming Sprint in LA. So many things about it were successful that I have had major writers block on how to get things started so I'm just going to jump write in.

The most exciting part of the sprint was not only the diversity of the people, but the diversity of experience as well. Plenty of newbies overcame their fears to tackle new skills. For example, Heather released her very first product to pypi, almost the whole crew picked up and ran with XDV, and Alice was an end user who just showed up and by the end of the first day was familiar with installing products through buildout, basic site admin, and fixing borked databases!

Why would her database get borked you ask? Because she went through and installed all 52 themes listed on plone.org to evaluate quality, take screenshots where necessary, and took copious notes of all posted themes that didn't uninstall cleanly or didn't install at all.

Now you are asking, why would someone do that? Only because we tackled the revamping PloneSoftwareCenter! This included adding ratings and we needed some data for when it goes live. Oh yeah. Alec took plone.contentratings from bad ass to bad asser while I worked on integrating and revamping the UI. Check out the screencast to get a preview of the changes. This will be a great accompaniment to the Plone 4 release so if you have any time at all to help get this deployed - ping me!

And finally you ask, why would you want to revamp PSC? Glad you asked. Plone.org has less than spectacular support for navigating themes and we needed to have a beautiful place to display all of the new themes that the rest of the crew came up with. 3 Mikes, Trish, Tyler, and Albert banged away on creating 3 beautiful XDV themes (coming your way soon after solving the packaging issue).

The best part of all? At the end all anyone wanted to know was when the next sprint would be. That's a trend I'm happy to obligue. Thanks to everyone who showed up and good work everyone!

Feed a QA Sprinter

The 2010 Plone Conference is just around the corner and sprint planning is well under way. One of the sprints will consist of creating Selenium tests and integrating with Hudson. As Plone moves towards more and more Javascript and Ajax interface these tests will be essential for maintaining a high quality code base. This sprint will be great for newbies and veterans alike with some potentially boring but definitely worthwhile QA work.

Ideally this sprint is crowded and short so that people can get back to their regularly scheduled sprints. If you will be in Bristol for the sprints, please consider donating 1-2 hours of time to help us get up and running. If you won't be in Bristol and want to remote sprint stay tuned! However, if you can't do either (or just hate doing that stuff) but want to support the effort, please consider chipping in to feed a sprinter.

If anyone has other ideas on how to lure people in or has items to donate as door prizes/giveaways/whatever I'm all ears. Additionally, if you have a company and/or want to sponsor this sprint directly let me know and I'll cancel the chip in.

Happy bug hunting!