The Plone community and software fit nicely within the larger Python ecosystem. Here’s why.
For almost as long as I have been involved in the Plone project, I’ve been interested in Plone’s role in the Python ecosystem. Today as I look across the current landscape, I’m proud to announce a new milestone the Plone community can take pride in. But the change didn’t happen overnight, so first let’s take a quick look back.
PyPI support in PSC
Circa 2008, Tarek Ziadé and others finished the PyPI integration branch of PloneSoftwareCenter started by Sidnei Da Silva 2 years before.
This was a big step towards the “Pythonification” of Plone, mainly because Plone packages could now be published on plone.org in the same way Python packages are published to the Python Package Index: via “python setup.py upload”. In fact if you are publishing Plone packages, it is recommended that you release to both PyPI and plone.org simultaneously. This ensures your package is visible to the most number of potential users. And you can use mkrelease to automate the process.
Collective docs at RTD
Just when you thought things couldn’t get more exciting in Python land, along came readthedocs.org (a Django Dash production, IIRC). And to join the fun in July 2011, I moved Mikko Ohtamaa’s awesome Plone Community Managed Developer Manual to the Github collective and configured the RTD service hook.
This means that whenever anyone commits a change to the developer manual, within a few minutes a new Sphinx build gets published. It was so easy to set this up, I wish I had done it sooner.
So you can that see over the years, we have been working ourselves into a frenzy of Python goodness! And last week, it got even better.
Introducing: Plone packages!
Thanks to the good folks at Cartwheel Web, makers of the fine Open Comparison service, Plone now has its very own grid comparison website! (Djangopackages.com was first, followed by pyramid.opencomparison.org.)
This is a site where folks can add packages hosted elsewhere (e.g. svn, github, pypi), vote on them, and add grid comparisons to compare similarly-featured add-ons, frameworks, and other related software. Grids are the killer feature of this site, and personally I’ve been waiting to use them to answer questions like:
Q: What’s the best blogging add-on for Plone?
A: http://plone.opencomparison.org/grids/g/weblogs/
The content is entirely user driven (TTW only) so please head over to plone.opencomparison.org, login with your github ID, and start adding packages! And while you are at it, please report any issues you find here: https://github.com/opencomparison/opencomparison/issues. Lastly, let’s all tweet a big thanks to @pydannyand @audreyr for their hard work and generosity!