Sixies by the Sea - Notes from Sea Sprint 2012

There is nothing like a targeted sprint to pull together the right people and achieve great things in a short period of time. The recent Sea Sprint, held on the coast of North Carolina was a wonderful example of how a well-planned event can deliver real results in just a few days.

Six Feet Up's Calvin Hendryx-Parker and Clayton Parker both attended the Sea Sprint September 21-24th on Oak Island, NC - joining a group of 10 sprinters.  Chris Calloway handled the logistics for the weekend and kept the team well-fed; while Ian Anderson and Andy Leeb sponsored the two sprint houses.

The Sea Sprint focused on Deco - a technology with huge potential for changing how content managers manage and change the layout of their Plone websites without the need to write code.

Clayton decided to take on doing bug-fixes and unit tests as his tasks for the sprint.  After upgrading plone.app.toolbar to Bootstrap 2.1.1, he worked to write tests for Deco as well as plone.app.tiles.  By the end of the sprint, he had written javascript unit tests for about 90% of the  Javascript code in plone.app.tiles.  You can read more about the tasks, as well as Clayton's thoughts on the sprint, in his sprint report.

Calvin jumped in on pulling together documentation for Deco, which was as mostly about pruning information which had accumulated since the project began in 2008. Using Sphinx, a documentation tool which allows the aggregation of information directly from the source code, the team created a new documentation site for deco which can be seen at https://github.com/plone/plone.app.deco. You can read more about the process of doing this, as well as what makes Deco such a significant upgrade, in Calvin's sprint report.

Sprints are a great opportunity to combine a good time, community building, and moving Plone forward in tangible ways. We're glad that Six Feet Up could participate and pleased to see such significant results in such a short time.