ifPeople's Contributions to Plone Community

We've been busy at ifPeople in the new year, with a lot of activity related to Plone. We are very pleased to bring you an update on our plans and progress in contributing to the Plone community.

Directions for Innovation

ifPeople has identified four areas for its research and development of new innovations in online technology for 2007. Those areas are:

• Search: Plone is great a managing content, but could use improvement when it comes to finding content...as sites get heavy in content, the site search feature needs help for a more useful, user-friendly experience. ifPeople is turning its products developed as part of a recent project into Plone addons (more below).
  
• Commerce: Plone is a great platform for development and creating custom websites, but it still lacks infrastructures for payment processing. ifPeople seeks to motivate and contribute to the creation of a payment framework for Plone that can be utilized in other products and easily deployed in Plone sites. For more on this project, see our collaborative site for Plone Commerce.
  
• Relationship management (CRM): Companies and organizations are realizing just how important good information about their relationships is. Plone can be a great complement for relationship management systems (such as CRM), serving as the public web site and gateway to building relationships. However, the tools often do not meet the client needs or are not robust. Last year, we announced basic integration with an open source system. Now we are working for more complete solutions, looking at new software and leveraging Plone's tools for integration.
  

We are constantly evolving this area of our work and encourage contact from those interested in collaboration or who need any of these features and would like to help fund their development. Contact us here.

Documentation

Last year, we announced our work on a collaborative documentation project for Plone endusers called LearnPlone. That work has continued to evolve, and we have added some recent contributions, the latest of which is a guide to search tips in Plone. This how-to guide joins the collection of tutorials, videos, FAQ's and more that are freely available on the site. Check out LearnPlone to find more great help with your Plone site.

Products

We are proud to announce our first products going into the community collection at the official Plone web site. We are currently in the process of posting three products related to search in Plone. The first to be released, ifSearchUI, is a series of user interface improvements for the latest versions of Plone. Simply install the product and best practices gathered from our research will be included in your site. Thanks to the visionary leaders at Health Sciences Online for funding this work and supporting its distribution as Free Software.

The next products to be released include:

• A search monitoring product that reports on terms searched and frequency.
  
• A user feedback form that integrates into the search results.
  
• An indexing product that allows you to create collections of fully indexed content that are searchable in a Plone site.
  

Contact us if you are interested in these products and want to receive future updates.

Local Community

ifPeople is also glad to say that there is now a user group for Plone in Atlanta! February 12, 2007 the group held a meeting at ifPeople's offices to socialize, learn, and spread Plone locally. To read more on the event or about future Plone meetings, check out Atlanta Plone.

Other News from Plone-land

Plone continues to evolve rapidly as a software and platform. A significant advance in that sense is embodied in the upcoming Plone 3.0 system. Recently, Plone 3.0 Alpha 2 (a precursor release) was made public. If you are looking to get a jumpstart on Plone 3.0 (and Zope 3), check out the upcoming training in North Carolina, Camp 5. If you can't make the training, you can pick up the latest edition of the instructor's book: Web Component Development with Zope 3. The current stable release (2.5.2 as of today) is available for installation on all platforms and already widely used. ifPeople is using this version in its internal web systems and in client sites.

Plone will be featured at the upcoming Jornadas Regionales de Software Libre (Regional Free Software Conference) in Córdoba, Argentina in August 2007. The organizers (which include two FairSource partners of ifPeople) are also planning a Plone training and sprint. International speakers attending the event include Eben Moglen, Richard Stallman, and more!