Open Dialogue

Ben and I attended the Bristol Plone Balloon Sprint this weekend, joining around 20 Plone developers and enthusiasts from across Europe. The sprint was kindly organised by Team Rubber, running from Thursday evening to Sunday afternoon, to coincide with the Bristol International Balloon Fiesta. The event started with welcome drinks in the Woods bar as participants began arriving in Bristol. The lively discussions around agile project management, Plone hosting and support and the anecdotes of previous sprints set the tone for a very enjoyable and productive weekend.

Various projects received attention from the hard work of the volunteers. Among the various Plone 4 PLIP’s and fixes, we saw some great work in the areas of Plone FormGen, LingaPlone, Usernamelogger, Transmogrifier, blob-aware image scaling, performance testing and XHTML validation testing and fixes. (Sorry if I’ve missed anything or linked incorrectly – the discussions we had on Twitter may offer more detail).

I was working on improvements to TinyMCE, the platform independent JavaScript HTML WYSIWYG editor proposed for the next major release of Plone. My team included Ben Mason of Sharkbyte, Per Thulin of Valentine Web Systems, and Owen Curtis-Quick of Team Rubber. Not being a coder, I was initially unsure how useful my skills would be on a sprint, but I needn’t have worried. My UX experience helped us make some good interface decisions, everyone worked well as a team and we produced some excellent results.

Our work focused mainly around administrable image sizes for content editors. We updated TinyMCE to ensure it’s available image sizes came from those set in the content types, allowing them to be easily overridden for the requirements of individual sites. We also added the missing image width and height attributes to the HTML that TinyMCE inserts – essential to nicely render pages without jumping. We added tests, and finished by ensuring compatibility with Plone 4 and the user configurable image size functionality that will be available when using Plone imaging. All of our work was approved by Rob Gietema, the maintainer of TinyMCE and has been merged into trunk to become part of the next release. A good job guys.

The whole event was kindly documented by Sasha Vinčić of Valentine Web Systems, with live video feeds (now available in his qik archive) and some nice photography on Flikr. Traditional entertainment was provided by Matt Wilkes in the form of Somerset Cider and occasional Worzels sound track – proper job Matt!

Above all it was great to meet and work with such an intelligent, friendly and dedicated group of people. Thanks for a great weekend guys – I look forward to the next one.