When is Plone 3 out?

A point on Plone / Zope roadmap and the upcoming Plone 3 release.

The Plone Team is working hard these days: we had a bugfix release for the 2.5 series in January and there is obviously an increasing anticipation for the next major release. A great presentation of Plone 3.0 was given in Seattle at the Plone Conference and the alpha release is available on the Plone website for testers, developers and fans.
There is an exciting set of new features, but before we go on and see them, we want to take a look at the big picture.

Plone grew up constantly in the years and now it is well accepted as an enteprise class content management.
Plone, as a product, it is the cms you would rely on: secure, well-designed and feature-rich, with a lot of official add-ons to extend its purposes; as a framework, it gives all the flexibility to customize and develop the web application that suites to the most complex needs.

This is partly thanks to the ground it is standing on - the Zope platform - and to its independent but not separated evolution; we currently cannot talk about Plone without mentioning Zope. Some of the Plone 3.0 features are built on Zope 3 innovations and, by the way, also some of the Plone 2.5.x feature does.

Plone and Zope Versions

Of course it would sound nice if the 3.x series of plone matched the 3.x branch of Zope, but this is not the case.
Currently we can find out that:

Plone stable branch is 2.5.x and current stable version is 2.5.2
Plone 3.0 is released as an alpha
Plone 3.5 is planned and not yet released

Plone 2.5.x runs on top of the application server Zope 2.8 and 2.9 AND can use Zope 3
Plone 3.0 runs on top of Zope 2.10 AND uses Zope 3 extensively

Zope 2 stable release from the current branch is Zope 2.10.2
Zope 2 stable release from the previous branch is is 2.9.6
Zope 3 current stable release is Zope 3.3.0

Plenty of stable, isn't it?

The matter is that Zope 3 is not yet another zope release: it is a parallel project that involves a complete Zope rewrite - left out the ZODB Object Database - and is being developed since 2004. Zope 3 is also known as Zope Component Architecture: it is intended to be a better development environment and to offer advanced, strongly enterprise oriented features.

3+2 = FIVE

Zope 3 is not (immediatly) going to replace Zope 2 under the Plone layer: the choice is to make innovation and integration live together by the means of another product, that is Zope FIVE, a Zope 2 product that allows to integrate Zope 3 technologies and use them within the oldest platform (FIVE = 3 +2).

With FIVE Plone 2.5 and Plone 3 can also use Zope 3 features but not need to be separated from Zope 2 platform; the strategy is not conservative only but also makes the whole thing move on because:

• new plone components, products and cmf parts are written with  Zope 3 technologies, while the
• the existent part is not migrated at once but will be gradually rewritten Zope 3 way

Yes, but, when is Plone 3 out ??

Plone 3.0 stable is not expected to be out until March and the release date should be 12 March 2007.

But, of course, a development release is out yet: currently the alpha release of Plone 3.0 is available for download from the Plone download center and it surely worth a try (mark: wise men do not use alpha on a production environment). Plone 3.0 compatibility is assumed with Zope 2.10, Archetypes 1.5, CMF 2.1.

Plone 3 Features

The 3.0 release is a lot about web 2.0 and usability and it should make a better living for both plone users and site builders. Here's just a quick overview on the most interesting groups of features:

• Authoring faster and easier

The introduction of the Plone Ajax framework with KSS allows to have ajax features higlhly integrated into Plone pages: this turns page editing into something very natural and quick. Ease of use and responsiveness should be noticed overall with things as wiki style syntax and in-place editing.

• Informations easier to find
  

Informations will be easier to find and to mantain: live search is addicting once you get used to it, and improved indexing engine will be faster and more accurate. A link-integrity feature was added to automatically detect, prevent and redirect broken links.

• Collaboration improved

On the collaboration side, many needs will be satisfied by the introduction of addictional default workflows: new pre-build workflows are made to meet common use cases, so that site mangers will only have to choose. Users will also be helped when sharing private content with the new reader and editor roles.
Versioning will come out of the box from Plone 3.0; staging and locking will also be available for sites that involve many people working at the same time.

• Easier to make basic site customization

A new portlets engine should allow to manage presentation of content comfortably: a brand-new interface has been introduced to give more control and simplicity at once.

• Talks better to other

With OpenID support it will be possible to share account between sites, without having to replicate autentication dozen of times.

• Takes security seriously

This is not a news but a honoured tradition of the Plone/Zope coupling. Plone has a very low exposure to security risks and Zope as a server has a high level of reliability. The Zope 3 Team is keeping up the commitment and is aiming to get the Common Criteria certification for Zope 3 (see Zope 3 Security Evalutation).

The complete list of features, with the state of proposal and changes, can be looked up at the official plone 3 roadmap.

Note: Plone 3 release date has been postponed to May 2007