Reinventing Plone: Roadmap to the Modern Web
Timo Stollenwerk
Length: Long Talk
Target Level: Intermediate
Target Audience: Integrator, Designer, User, Developer
"When Plone 1.0 was released over a decade ago those were different times. There were no smartphones, JavaScript was nothing more than a way to animate elements on a website, and open source was more a niche for nerds than a business.
Fast forward to 2018. Mobile is everywhere and JavaScript became the predominant programming language for the web. JavaScript-based web technology is used to build not only websites and web applications for the browser but also to build desktop apps, native mobile applications and virtual reality apps. Open source became mainstream and some of the world largest corporations make large parts of their web stack available to the public.
We live in exciting times for web developers! Though, Plone is a mature open source project with more than 500k lines of code, a wide variety of add-on products and huge ecosystem of companies, developers, and projects. Therefore, the modern web is a huge challenge for us.
More than four years ago, we started to develop both a vision and real-world software to bring modern web technology to Plone. The starting point was the development of plone.restapi in 2014, to allow to use modern JavaScript frameworks on top of Plone. Since then apps and SDKs have been developed for Angular, React, VueJS and others. The project that gained the most traction lately was Plone-React, a new frontend for Plone written in pure ReactJS. Plone-React implements a new UX/UI framework for bringing a better user experience to our editors and users. At the same time we worked on implementig Guillotina, a new, plone.restapi compliant, super-scalable, asynchronous Python 3 web framework that can be used as an alternative backend for Plone-React. Exciting times for being a Plone developer!
This talk will present the current status of the tireless work of many individuals in the Plone community over the last years. It will present a common vision of how those project can come together to shape the future of Plone."