Plone 3.5

Hi.

While everyone is waiting for Plone 4 and its rather long timeline, some
people have been thinking about how to bridge the gap between the
current stable 3.x releases and the future.

The general idea that seems to have met some consensus is to go for a
Plone 3.5 release up next. We'd skip any 3.4 release and go for a 3.5
that is similar in spirit to the Plone 2.5 release. It tries to both
refresh some of our technical underpinnings in addition to some more
intrusive feature changes we didn't allow ourselves in the 3.x series so
far.

In order to frame the scope of such a release I made a listing of some
of the potential features for such a release at
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=rFHYANxtkRfGYchi1QuS5dA. The list
is both non-exclusive and non-binding in the recommendations.

The envisioned timeline for a Plone 3.5 release would be to aim for a
final release either by the time of the conference or by the end of this
year, giving us six months or a bit more for it. By aiming for an
after-summer beta deadline we will have a chance of leveraging some
Google Summer of Code contributions for such a release.

When it comes to the official personal involved in such a new major
release, I'd like to suggest a slight deviation on our process. As many
to all of the features changes in question for the 3.5 release have so
far been in the scope of the 4.0 release, I'd suggest to appoint the
entire 4.0 framework team to be the official team for 3.5 as well. This
forces them to get involved with the process in a more defined and clear
way now.

On the side of the release manager, Wichert has signaled that his
workload as a freelancer will not allow him to take over the shepherding
of a new major release. We do however have with Eric Steele of PSU fame
a well-known interested candidate for the position.

This is only a proposal that needs community feedback and encouragement
at this point to make it into an official roadmap. The next steps are to
have an open discussion about this for the next one to two weeks. If it
meets general favor, we will appoint the new/old framework team and let
them recommend a release manager to the Foundation board for official
nomination.

Cheers,
Hanno