Re: [Plone-developers] The new Plone 4.0

Alexander Limi wrote:
> On Tue, 05 May 2009 15:56:36 -0700, Ricardo Alves  
> <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
>> Steve McMahon wrote:
>>> My only concern about calling Hanno's incremental change list 4.0 is
>>> that we don't suffer from big-number expectation syndrome.
>> This is the biggest risk I guess, a major release with just a minor set  
>> of visible (UI) improvements, will bring bad publicity.
> 
> I agree — this is the biggest risk in terms of calling it 4.0 instead of  
> 3.5. The consensus to call the 2009 release 4.0 makes sense to me — so +1  
> on that decision.
> 
> One way to mitigate this — and make Plone seem a bit more modern along the  
> way — could be to apply the new typography/theme that I'm currently  
> applying to trunk. This is essentially the typography from the plone.org  
> redesign along with a color-neutral design for the navigation and other UI  
> elements. The goal is to make something that you can put the company logo  
> on, and it looks relatively decent, no matter what your company colors are.
> 
> This would make 4.0 seem "fresh" out of the box, make it look like an  
> application from 2009, and let us ship with considerably more  
> efficient/smaller CSS files.
> 
> The risk would be that we need to do some IE6 testing on it, but that  
> might not be a bad thing, since we know much more about IE6 workarounds at  
> this point than we did when the original CSS was written.

I'd support this, *if* it follows the usual PLIP process and we actively 
encourage outside review from the get-go. That process may mean the 
theme change gets a thumbs-down.

Personally, I think it's a good idea, but in the past, we've had a lack 
of commitment/follow-up with CSS/theme stuff, and a last-minute rush to 
put in dozens of template and CSS changes which then cause breakage in 
release candidates.

We'd also need to find a way to not break all existing themes.

A small visual refresh would be welcome, though. Plone is looking a bit 
last millenium. :-/

Martin

-- 
Author of `Professional Plone Development`, a book for developers who
want to work with Plone. See http://martinaspeli.net/plone-book