PSE2010 - DEXTERITY

One of the talks that I found very interesting was "A Dexterity Intro for Recovering Archetypes Addicts", by David Glick.

In his presentation, David explained how he met with other people to brainstorm on what would be the future of Archetypes, and how they came up with Dexterity.

I really like the goals and philosophy of the people working on Dexterity: through-the-web content type development, possibility to switch back and forth between the Archetypes and Dexterity, reuse over reinvention, small over big, natural interaction over excessive generality, automated testing over wishful thinking...

Here are a few great features:

• the boiler plate template is much smaller in Dexterity (see collective.dexteritypaste for more details)
• you can still export content types via Generic Setup
• it has the full power of z3c.form to create forms easily
• better support for image scaling. For example, you can specify whatever file size you want, you don't have to use the preset sizes from Plone.
• they are using grok styles (i.e. configuration via directives inline with code, instead of via zcml)

The talk made me really curious to see how it would continue evolving, so I subscribed to their development list. I can't wait to actually work on a project that uses it.