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Six Feet Up recently participated in the "Cheese Sprint" that followed the annual Plone Symposium Midwest hosted at the University of Oshkosh on June 20-21-22, 2014. About 30 people gathered from around the world to work on six specific projects:

Improving the jbot resource editor was addressed by Nathan Van Gheem, Chrissy Wainwright, Rob Porter and Sam Schwartz, who worked toward being able to edit any Plone template through the web. This will make things easier for template developers, as they will eventually be able to search through all available templates to make customizations without getting into the ZMI.

Enhancing the Plone login process (plone.login) was the focus of Joel Kleier, Franco Pellegrini, Andy Leeb and Clayton Parker, who strived to extend the overall Plone form modernization effort to the login process. The new system will support the use of external accounts to authenticate. It will also feature a more modern (and less intimidating) registration process where users can quickly create an account and fill out their profile later on.  Developers will also benefit from the improvements, as it'll be easier for them to customize elements of the login and authentication systems (e.g. password policy, user redirection after login, out-of-the-box user profile customization, etc.)

Improving collective.cover was done by Hector Velarde, Nathan Van Gheem, Gildardo Bautista and Adriana Ramirez. Collective.cover is an editor-friendly way of creating front pages and other composite pages. The goal is to make the tool more reliable by fixing some known bugs. The team is working toward simplifying the code to facilitate the maintenance of the add-on down the road.

Accelerating back-end development was the focus of Ross Patterson, who specifically worked on improving the "test runner layers" tool. The idea is that improving the speed of the tests ran after each series of code changes will shorten development cycles, encourage more extensive test coverage, and facilitate bug fixes by keeping developers "in the flow".

Boosting the Plone installer approachability in Plone 5 was tackled by Sven Strack, Paul Roeland, Steve McMahon, Kurt Bendl, Calvin Hendryx-Parker and Clayton Parker. The team focused on various initiatives to make it much easier to deploy Plone. They worked on making the existing installer easier to use in different environments. They also worked on integrating the "Packer" tool into the Plone release process to support the automatic creation of images for virtual boxes in various cloud environments.

Part of the efforts went toward simplifying the installation process in OS X and departing from the universal installer in response to the changes seen in OS X over the last few years. Finally, they looked at making it easier for developers and integrators to create their own Plone add-ons through best practices documentation and an update of the Plone API.

Some team members specifically worked on generating example code to facilitate the integration into Plone of commonly used add-ons maintained by other open source communities (e.g. cookie, cutter, Mr Bob, etc.).

Adding success stories to the upcoming Plone.com site was tackled by Christina Mcneill, Carol Ganz, Gabrielle Hendryx-Parker, Sally Kleinfeldt, William Fennie, Luke Scorcio, Paul Roeland, Ken Wasetis and Peter Wood. The team identified a series of key features for various verticals and strived to develop a framework for submitting case studies for publication on the plone.com site. As a result of this exercise, several success stories were identified as potential illustrations of Plone use cases.

As always, sprints provide a great opportunity for community members to collaborate and advance. Check out plone.org for information about upcoming sprints.