Plone 4.2 Just Released, Brings Usability Improvements

The official announcement came this week, and the team here at Six Feet Up is excited!

The keyword for this release is: easy to use.

While Plone has many powerful features to manage content and provide a consistent look and feel, they might have been considered harder to use or had complicated steps to activate. This new release focuses on addressing some of these concerns.

"The keyword for this release is: easy to use."

Updated Collections

Plone's system of Collections have provided a powerful method of pulling together content into a single unified view. However, the interface for defining the criteria to collect the content can leave you scratching your head.

This release features a completely overhauled user interface that includes some very slick AJAX. This makes it very intuitive to manipulate the criteria with no distracting page reloads.

Bundled Theming

The Diazo theming system is a fresh new take on customizing the look and feel of your site. It can be used to unify the appearance of multiple underlying technologies. However, there have been some barriers to setting it up and configuring it correctly with Plone.

Plone 4.2 removes a few of these by bundling the integration package (plone.app.theming) with the core distribution and updating the installers to make it easy to use out of the box. Way to follow the Python batteries-included philosophy!

Upgraded Python

The framework team went to great lengths to ensure that this latest release functions well with Python 2.7, culminating in making it the version used by the installers. This will be a welcome improvement with our development and hosting teams, as it contains useful improvements to the standard library and performance enhancements.

Congratulations

Great job, Eric Steele, on getting this release out the door! It is good to see the continued focus on improving the user experience.

Keep your eye on the Plone Demo site: it will be updated to this latest release soon.