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!