Blog

The Mira App: Why HTML5 Rocks

Calvin Hendryx-Parker — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 22:42:54 -0400

This year we were very happy to have the opportunity to work with TechPoint on a mobile app for their annual Mira Awards event.

I got a chance to directly contribute code to the app and I must say I had a blast. I actually had so much fun I found myself waking up at 3am to keep improving it.

While I had originally looked at JQuery Mobile, PhoneGap, and Appcelerator, I ultimately chose Sencha Touch, a high-performance HTML5 mobile application framework for building universal apps that run on any device. I love its consistent user experience across all platforms, not just iPhones and Androids. This means we also get an output for Windows Mobile and Blackberry users, which is pretty slick.

The Mira App now boasts a native look, even though it's an HTML5 app. Users can bookmark it like a webpage that saves content locally. It gets real-time updates for fast and responsive interaction between the event organizers and their audience.

HTML5 rocks because of its standards compliance out of the box and its faster, leaner UI for most of our needs. Really, unless you need 3D rendering and accelerated graphics, you most likely don't need a native app. Especially since Sencha Touch still gives you access to core hardware functionalities such as GPS, camera, and other sensors using native packaging tools.

Also, with HTML5, there is no third party approval process to slow you down. Yet you still have the possibility of adding your HTML5 apps to the Apple and Android stores if desired.

So, if you are interested in getting your feet wet with HTML5, I would recommend Sencha Touch: check out their online video tutorials and the Kitchen Sink (note: use Safari or Google Chrome to view the Kitchen Sink). Also, be sure to invest some time upfront in learning the thought-process behind how Sencha Touch constructs an app. Once you understand it, you will leverage the framework instead of fighting it.

If you'd like to discuss a mobile app for your organization or upcoming event, contact us.

If you haven't already seen the app you can test drive it here: m.sixfeetup.com/mira

You can also learn more about our integrated mobile app solutions.

Four Plone 4.3 Benefits You Should Know About

Calvin Hendryx-Parker — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 19:20:00 -0400

Being both volunteers on the Plone Foundation and the largest Plone provider in the U.S., we get really excited when a new version of Plone is released to the public. Plone 4.3 does not disappoint, with great new features that make it easier for end users, marketing teams, and site administrators to modify their content and themes with less developer support. That's right, when we help you upgrade to Plone 4.3, you will save time and money while having even more flexibility with your site's content and look. Here are some critical features worth the upgrade to Plone 4.3:

Improved Syndication

Most teams like to reuse/syndicate their content to a variety of audiences. Plone 4.3 makes this a lot easier with new support for Atom and iTunes feeds. You can also directly manage your RSS settings from a control panel in Plone. Plone 4.3 also provides new hooks for easier feed output customization.

If you are looking for robust syndication and control within a network of sites, Six Feet Up has created some great technologies that enable the syndication and curation of content both across sub-sections of one Plone site or across multiple sites. This includes syndicating content across Plone and non-Plone sites since most large organizations will not consolidate to a single web platform. These are separate add-ons that connect to Plone and other open source CMS solutions.

In-Plone theme editor

With the new In-Plone theme editor, it is possible to completely build new Diazo themes from within the user interface as well as modify your existing theme. In some cases, this removes the need for back-end developer work to get your theme up and running or modify your theme. Of course, if you have more complex integrations and requirements, we can still do that for you. It also means that you may be able to do more theme updates on your own if you desire. You get more flexibility with your new themes in less time.

Updated to TinyMCE 3.4

TinyMCE is the editor window that every user relies on to input new info into your site, so any upgrade to it is critical and greatly welcomed. It's faster, more compatible, and allows you to do more. Here are just a few major improvements:

Improved Internet Explorer support to avoid some IE annoyances
Improved performance in all browsers
Full WAI-ARIA compatibility for web accessibility compliance
Additional HTML5 support and iframes support for embedding things like YouTube clips
Added Dexterity compatibility

Dexterity content framework

The Dexterity content type framework is considered a major step forward in the evolution of Plone. Content types control how a site performs and what it displays when visitors interact with it. Dexterity makes it much more efficient to build content types, test them, and reuse them in sites. We are lucky to get this early as it was previously planned for Plone 5.

These four benefits in Plone 4.3 are great reasons to upgrade your site and be prepared for Plone 5 (which we expect to be released at the end of this year). There are also a few noteworthy changes for developers including decreased memory usage, the removal of kupu, and KSS functionality has been migrated to jQuery.

If you are interested in learning more about the benefits of upgrading to Plone 4.3 and the process, contact Carol Ganz at carol@sixfeetup.com or +1 (317) 861-5948 x610 for a free consultation.

Thanks to the contributors to Plone, we all have a better platform to manage our web presence.

About Six Feet Up, Inc.:

Founded in 1999, Six Feet Up is a woman-owned company that develops, hosts and supports open source sophisticated web projects, from enterprise content management and collaborative intranets to mobile apps. While the company has reached a leading position in the Plone market, Six Feet Up also leverages high-profile open source software, such as KARL, Pyramid, Django and Sencha Touch. Six Feet Up's clients include top universities and life sciences organizations, growing and distributed teams, as well as Fortune 500 companies.

Women Working in Tech Event Features Sixies

Lauren Edwards — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 08:00:00 -0400

Six Feet Up is again sponsoring the annual Women Working in Technology Conference (WWiT) in 2013. This year's conference is focused around Aiming High: Striving for Success with Focus and Balance. The conference is an initiative put on by the Center for Information and Communication Sciences (CICS) at Ball State University in Muncie, IN. WWiT promotes and supports technology careers for individuals in high school and beyond. The annual conference brings together high school students, college students, and technology professionals for a day of networking and learning.

Six Feet Up has been a sponsor of the conference every year since 2010, and has had several members invited to present on various topics throughout the years. This year is no different, as both Jim Bartek and myself will be participating in the sessions this year and several members of the team will also be in attendance. Jim has been asked to serve as the moderator for the panel session: Big Data Analysis, What You Need to Know, and I will be presenting in the Ignite session, Top 10 Technology Trends of 2013 on the topic: Open Source: Good for You, Good for Your Business.

As an alumnae of the CICS program at Ball State University, I feel honored to have been invited to be a member of the Conference's Advisory and Planning Committee since 2008 serving with some of the nation's top female IT professionals in the industry today. Being a professional at Six Feet Up, a women-owned technology company, who employs about 50% women and supports efforts to encourage the current and next generation of female technology leaders, I am able to be part of a living, breathing success story of the changing face and diversity of the historically male dominated tech industry.

In today's world, one can almost not get through the day without some interaction with technology. The tech industry needs qualified and competent resources, both male and female, to support the ever-growing demand more now than ever. Efforts to grow and diversify that resource pool only strengthen the gains realized by the companies in the industries. I am happy to be a small part of a conference and company who are doing their part.

4 Python Web Frameworks Compared

Clayton Parker — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 11:30:00 -0400

On February 26th, Six Feet Up participated in the IndyPy Python Web Shootout 2013, where 4 companies showed off 4 Python frameworks through the demo of a ToDo app developed in Bottle, Django, Flask and Pyramid.

Here's a quick review of the various tools:

Pyramid - Flexible

Six Feet Up Dir. of Engineering Clayton Parker unveiled Pyramid. A demo of this version is available; the code powering it and step-by-step build instructions are on GitHub.

Pyramid was born out of a merge between Pylons 1.0 and repoze.bfg. Pyramid comes with "batteries included" but doesn't make any assumptions about the components of your site. The Pyramid community is growing fast. Documentation is outstanding and allows developers to make progress without having to rely on the community support. Pyramid strives to be minimalistic, fast and reliable. It was one of the first web frameworks to be compatible with Python 3.

Pyramid is great for:

Getting started quickly
Developers working on API projects
Prototyping a concept
Developing large web applications, such as a CMS or a KMS

Also check out our Blog Post:
Intro to the Python Framework Pyramid
And join our mailing list

Bottle - Simple

Nathan Davis from Angie's List started off by presenting his ToDo app built in Bottle, as it is the framework used in his company for API projects. The source for this example can be found on GitHub.

Bottle is a simple micro framework that provides minimal tools out of the box (routing, templating and a small abstraction over WSGI). Bottle can run on Python 3.

Bottle is great for:

Developers looking for flexibility
Creating a web API
People who want to build something really simple

Django - Powerful

Jason Sole and Jason McLaughlin from DirectEmployers showed off Django, which they use to power their job portal. The source for this example is on GitHub.

Django is by far the largest Python-based web framework. It is supported by a large and active community. It comes with a powerful admin interface as well as many other features out of the box. Django offers model-based forms, has its own templating language, and has excellent documentation available.

Django is great for:

Developers who like to share ideas with each other via online forums
Developers who want to build something quickly with powerful built-in tools

Useful Django apps:

South (for schema and data migrations)
Django Celery
Django Rest Framework or TastyPie
Django Extensions

Flask - Nimble

Pradeep Gowda, with ENthEnergy showed off Flask. The source for this example is on GitHub.

Flask is a micro framework that was originally created as an April Fool's joke that proved a single file framework could exist. It strives to be simple and small; the entire framework consists of a handful of modules. There is no skeleton to start from; instead, you start with a blank page. While flask doesn't provide a lot out of the box, there are Flask extensions available to add in ORM, form validation, upload handling, etc.

Flask is great for:

Learning programming
Developers who care about best practices and "tasteful" code
Developers who want to prototype something quickly
Developers who need a standalone app

Popular combinations of framework templating and ORM include the following:

Flask + Jinja2 + SQLAlchemy
Flask + Mako + SLQLAlchemy
Flask + Jinja2 + Peewee
Flask + CouchDB

Watch video presentations on all four versions on YouTube.
You can also see step by step instructions and access the code on GitHub.

Indiana developers are invited to attend the next few IndyPy Meetups where the four ToDo apps will be further reviewed.

Six Feet Up Supports Children's Charity

Jim Bartek — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 13:32:04 -0500

Six Feet Up took the team out for the Pack The House Night Indiana Ice hockey game on March 2nd and sponsored a foster family to attend for free. We chose to support The Villages of Indiana, which helps children find loving families and supports those families to provide a great environment for kids.

Those of us who could make it had a ton of fun hanging out together with our families and supporting a great cause.

Gabrielle and Calvin, the founders of Six Feet Up, have always believed in giving back to both the local community and the open source community. We also volunteer a lot of time to organize numerous events including Fortville's Bastille Day celebration, and the IndyPy Python Users Group.

Six Feet Up is a great place to work at (read Why We Work Here) and I'm proud to be one of the new additions to the team this year (We're Growing!).

Intro to the Python Framework Pyramid

Calvin Hendryx-Parker — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 10:30:00 -0500

We prefer Pyramid to Django, Flask, and Bottle due to its flexibility, scalability and speed. It gives us more control than Django and is easy to create a small app that can scale later without being rewritten. These are many of the same reasons for Why We Choose Python in general.

Recently we provided some training on how Pyramid works that was recorded. It provides a great overview of why Pyramid is ideal and how to setup a basic app with scaffolds, routes, and persistence. We also built a ToDo App for a web shootout we organized in Indianapolis through IndyPy. Putting these together turned out to be a great introduction to Pyramid, so I wrote this post.

To get a good understanding of the Pyramid framework and see how to implement a basic ToDo app from scratch:

Watch our Intro to Pyramid video below (21 min)
Play with the ToDo app demo at http://demo.todo.sixfeetup.com/
Read the step by step instructions in the ToDo app README.md at https://github.com/indypy/todopyramid
Checkout the official documentation and tutorials at http://docs.pylonsproject.org/en/latest/docs/pyramid.html

If you would like to discuss Six Feet Up building your next web application, contact us or signup for our newsletter to get more articles like this.

If you are looking for a an in depth comparison of Pyramid vs. other frameworks check out Why We Choose Pyramid for Rapid Web Development Projects.

Here are some key points from the video:

General Info

Pyramid is a Python based open source web framework. According to the project's website:

As a framework, its primary job is to make it easier for a developer to create an arbitrary web application. The type of application being created isn’t really important; it could be a spreadsheet, a corporate intranet, or a social networking platform. Pyramid is general enough that it can be used in a wide variety of circumstances.

The Pyramid tenets are:

Simplicity
Minimalism
Documentation
Speed
Reliability
Openness

Pyramid is based on Zope, Pylons, and Django. It supports small and large projects so there is no need to rewrite like you would with small frameworks. It's also the fastest Python web framework.

The Pyramid Configuration Supports:

imperative configuration
conflict detection
extensibility
flexible authentication and authorization policies
programmatic introspection

Scaffolding and Templating

Pyramid comes with several basic scaffolds to get you started and lets you pick your preferred templating system. Chameleon, Mako, Jinja 2 and others are supported.

Persistence

Pyramid lets you pick whatever persistence method you prefer and supports ZODB and SQLAlchemy. You could also use MongoDB, PostgreSQL and others.

Additional Resources

Pyramid 1.4 Docs - http://docs.pylonsproject.org/projects/pyramid/en/1.4-branch/
Pyramid Denials - http://docs.pylonsproject.org/en/latest/denials/pyramid.html

Why We Choose Python

Calvin Hendryx-Parker — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 10:50:00 -0500

At Six Feet Up, our language of choice has been Python for 13+ years, so we're happy to see that Python is now one of the fastest-growing programing languages, even rivaling PHP to become the most popular interpreted language. (source).

Today I explore the reasons why we believe Python is the language of choice for serious developers.

In 1999, a friend of mine introduced me to Zope, which was built in Python, an open source dynamic language. It looked intriguing but I had no reason for it as the company I was with was using Java at the time. So, when I was faced with the exciting prospect of developing Six Feet Up's first client website, I naturally turned to Zope and Python as it looked like a much lighter and more flexible tool than the Java application server I was used to.

I quickly got hooked on Python and we have since then deployed hundreds of web projects using this language.

Here are the reasons why we have been choosing Python for the past decade:

1) Python is robust

There is a good reason why Bank of America has chosen Python to power many of their critical systems. (source) It's solid and powerful. Python has a relative small quantity of lines of code, which makes it less prone to issues, easier to debug, and more maintainable. The Securities Exchange Commission has sought to mandate Python as the language for a new "waterfall" program that would make Wall Street more transparent. Python can scale to solve complex problems, as illustrated by the fact that it powers most of YouTube and DropBox, not to mention Reddit, Quora, Disqus and FriendFeed. Even the mighty Google has made Python one of its official programming languages. It's also very fast.

2) Python is flexible

In 2007 YouTube migrated from PHP to Python for scalability purposes, citing that "Python enables flexibility". Python is used in a wide array of industries and for a long list of different usages, from websites and web applications to systems administration, voice over IP, and desktop apps. Python is also a staple of the Scientific community.

Because it wasn't originally created to answer a specific need, Python isn't driven by templates or specific APIs, and is therefore well-suited to rapid development of all kinds of applications. As a company focused on advanced web development, we really like this flexibility.

3) Python is easy to learn and use

"Python in particular emerges as a near ideal candidate for a first programming language", says John M. Zelle, in the Department of Mathematics, Computer Science, and Physics at Wartburg College in Iowa (source). We certainly agree with this as we find Python intuitive and fun. We don't have to look up references frequently, nor are we overwhelmed by the formalities of the language, like we would in Java or C++.

Python's simple and straight-forward syntax also encourages good programming habits, especially through its focus on white space indentation, which contributes to the development of neat looking code.

Finally, while PHP is notorious for the inconsistency in its naming methods, Python's naming convention is prevalent from module to module, so developers are less likely to make syntax errors. This means fewer bugs and faster development.

ALSO READ: Intro to the Python Framework Pyramid (with video a sample app & step-by-step instructions on GitHub)
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4) Python reduces time to market

Gartner estimates that 90% of enterprises are using open source software—including Perl, Python and Tcl—to build business-critical applications. That's because dynamic languages are an excellent solution for fast time-to-market for enterprise applications. Python makes it possible to get applications to market faster in part due to the fact that it has a huge standard library and is often referred to as coming with "batteries included". In addition, Python stays out of my way. Therefore I can be more productive than if I was using Java/XML: the same task will require less code using Python.

5) Python is free.

Since Python is an open source programming language, we immediately reduce up-front project costs by leveraging Python in our development projects.

Now, I'll agree that, more than a choice of language, what matters is the experience of the development team, their process, and how well they follows standards and best practices. We only work with experts in their fields so we can be proud of the code we deliver. Should you need assistance with your Python project, we'll be happy to help through a variety of professional services.

9th ShipIt Day at Six Feet Up is Complete

Jim Bartek — Mon, 21 Jan 2013 16:20:00 -0500

At Six Feet Up we like to hold a ShipIt Day every quarter. We truly believe in what Atlassian started and use it as a great way to foster creativity, have fun, and let our team members focus on a project that they are passionate about. We also like to try out different spaces and get out of our office every now and then. This ShipIt day was held Jan. 17-18th 2013 at Launch Fishers, a new co-working space in Fishers, Indiana.

Everyone came out of ShipIt Day really energized and excited about each other's projects. In 24 hours we have made some great improvements and explored new ideas that would never be considered if we didn't clear our schedules periodically. Below is a summary of each team and what they worked on during the day.

ShipIt Day Projects

Team GitUp

This team moved Six Feet Up packages from SVN to the collective (GitHub), including packages such as collective.easyslideshow, collective.blog.feedburner, sixfeetup.worflow.chained, sixfeetup.workflow.featured, sixfeetup.utils etc. This makes it easier for developers in the community to see the work we've done, submit issues and submit pull requests to improve them.

Team Grab Bag

Grab Bag was a project full of Michelle's personal development interests related to communicating with clients and internally. She developed a personal blog editorial calendar and looked into insights derived from taking the DISC Personality Assessment. She came up with blog ideas and a personal blog post, news article, and case study plan for 2013. Michelle also created a weekly inspirational video strategy as part of internal communication.

Team Mobile App Setup for Conferences

On this team we had a few of our developers help Lauren learn how to edit a mobile app and insert content into the app framework from her laptop. The resulting app allows end users to access information for an upcoming conference's speakers, sessions, sponsors, and tweets.

Team Rule DNS

This team created a DNS control panel app based on Pyramid and SQLAlchemy to manage DNS zones, Xen virtual machines, and ZFS storage provisioning. Calvin tried out Twitter Bootstrap as well which helped make a quick and clean interface. Luke and Calvin also spent a lot of time helping out some of the other teams.

Team Template

Nolan worked on making it easier to make Pyramid apps faster. We now have templates for Pyramid apps that are standalone as well as updates to existing Pyramid apps that use ZODB, SQLAlchemy, or no pre-defined storage.

Team TimeFreq

The team identified strategic events for Six Feet Up to attend in 2013. The group also developed Event and Project Timelines as well as an Editorial Calendar to coordinate activities leading to an event and scheduled past an event. A news queue was put together with a list of news items, blog posts and case studies to write and publish on the Six Feet Up website. Finally, the team developed a plan to validate assumptions regarding our strategy for 2013.

Team Todo - SHIPIT DAY WINNER

The team worked on a replacement for the current master Trac instance that we use to schedule and coordinate work. Lucie got the project organized and entered tickets for each task we wanted to accomplish. David hooked up LDAP authentication and implemented the user preferences panel. Chrissy implemented the design using Twitter bootstrap. The team won $200 to a charity of their choice! One of the our Sixies, Chrissy, and her husband started the Imago Dei Church in New Hampshire, which the team selected as their charity.

Next ShipIt Day May 9-10th, 2013:

Our next ShipIt Day will be May 9-10th in the Indianapolis area. As Always Six Feet Up will be opening its doors to any third-party participants or observers interested in deploying the ShipIt Day concept in their own organizations as a way to promote healthy and effective employee motivation practices. For more information, please contact info-AT-sixfeetup-DOT-com.

The Five Values That Power Six Feet Up

Gabrielle Hendryx-Parker — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 08:00:00 -0500

Six Feet Up is growing and we are fortunate to find ourselves looking for new Sixies to join the team again. As I prepare to welcome new recruits, I find myself reflecting on what makes the magic of working at Six Feet Up. The challenge is to share our traditions in a way that is true to what we have built and to condense it into a short and effective message.

Over the years, we have developed a distinctive culture based on a unique set of 5 essential values, some drawn from the book Drive by Daniel Pink:

AUTONOMY: Autonomy is about acting with choice and working with others. As Sixies, we are free to choose how we want to accomplish our tasks. We are free to work with whom we want to if we need help. Except for scheduled work, we can choose when we want to work. And once a quarter, we pick what to work on for ShipIt Day.

MASTERY: We see our capabilities as infinitely improvable. We are forever flirting with total mastery, forever getting closer but never quite reaching the impossible goal of perfection. Finding the "flow" is everyday's aspiration.

TEAMWORK: While we sometimes get mad at each other while on our quest for perfection, we know in our hearts that we are part of a big family. We work, we eat, we drink, we play, we plan, we celebrate, we drive, we go on vacation together. We dress alike at conferences. We are "Sixies".

PURPOSE: We realize work is just work without a sense of contributing to a cause larger than ourselves. Open source is our cause. We repeatedly insist that free software should be "free as in speech, not as in beer". We make software a matter of expression, not property.[1]

WORK-LIFE BALANCE: Today's technologies have made it possible to work pretty much whenever we want, wherever we want. So we work from the doctor's office, the gas station, a Caribbean island, a hotel in Paris. We bring our baby, our 4th grader, our mom, our dog, our cat, our pig to work. This flexibility makes it possible to attend our daughter's recital at 4pm on a Wednesday, take our dog for a haircut on a Monday morning or be with our grandmother at the hospital while she recovers. Human-friendly is the Six Feet Up way.

Does this culture appeal to you? Check out our job openings to see if we have a position for you.

Zope DateTime, Careful with that Dash, Eugene

David Blewett — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 09:55:00 -0400

Zope DateTime

The Zope DateTime library is used in several places inside of Plone. As part of the Plone 4 release cycle, the underlying Zope version was upgraded from 2.10 to 2.12. Tucked away in this version of the DateTime library is this:

Note that the Zope DateTime parser assumes timezone naive ISO strings to be in UTC rather than local time as specified.

This is an unexpected behavior change that can bite you in various ways. For example, in previous versions of Plone this is what happened:

>>> from DateTime import DateTime
>>> dash_date = '2012-10-03'
>>> slash_date = '2012/10/03'
>>> DateTime(dash_date)
DateTime('2012/10/03')
>>> DateTime(slash_date)
DateTime('2012/10/03')

In the current version, this happens instead:

>>> from DateTime import DateTime
>>> dash_date = '2012-10-03'
>>> slash_date = '2012/10/03'
>>> DateTime(dash_date)
DateTime('2012/10/03 00:00:00 GMT+0')
>>> DateTime(slash_date)
DateTime('2012/10/03 00:00:00 GMT-4')

Note the timezone change: one gets parsed into UTC, the other the local machine timezone. This is because the parser is using the ISO format due to the dashes in the string. This led to several unexpected behavior changes:

If you're writing custom code for Plone 4, it is a good idea to double-check how your application processes date / time input to ensure the timezone is correctly handled.

Why Upgrade to Plone 4

David Blewett — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 15:24:58 -0400

A question we often hear when discussing projects with clients is, "Why should I upgrade to Plone 4?" This post will attempt to answer that question by highlighting some of the changes that affect both users and developers.

1. Benefits for Users

Speed

Hanno Schlichting has done some benchmarks for major releases in the 4.x line, summarizing:

Compared to Plone 3.3 Plone 4.0 is about 50% faster, ranging from 30% for edit pages up to 70% for anonymous page views.

In order to illustrate the impact I used one large real site and tweaked it to resemble a default Plone 4.0 and 4.1. … For pages doing either multiple catalog searches or catalog searches over large amounts of content we get an improvement of 2x up to 4x. For an edit screen that doesn't even show the navigation tree, there's less benefit. But even rendering the top sections and the language selector results in a 1.4x improvement for this site.

Latest Product Versions

Each major release of Plone consists of updates, bug fixes and feature additions to a large number of products. For example, the version of the Products.ATContentTypes (the core product behind Plone's stock content type framework) has seen a very large number of changes since the version released in the 3.x line.

Modern Visual Editor

In Plone 4.0, the default visual editor was switched from the aging Kupu product to the more modern TinyMCE. Jon Stahl wrote a good article comparing the two. In it, he cites the following improvements of TinyMCE over Kupu:

It gets the “Link” drawer right. Kupu has two separate drawers, one for internal (inside your site) links, and one for external links. That’s confusing and awkward for users. TinyMCE combines these into a single drawer, and raises Kupu by adding point-and-click support for mailto: and https: links and control over whether links open a new window. The overall design of the drawer is a lot cleaner and it feels a lot more responsive.
Similarly, Product.TinyMCE’s “Image” drawer is also a nice improvement. Its features are basically equivalent to Kupu’s, although its support for image captioning is a bit cleaner.
Product.TinyMCE’s support for creating and editing HTML tables is pretty solid. This was always a weak area for Kupu, and a very difficult task for any graphical HTML editor.
Products.TinyMCE handles Flash embedding in a clean and user-friendly way. Flash embedding is possible in current versions of Kupu, but often feels a bit awkward and unreliable.

Improved Search

Plone 4.0 introduced changes to the advanced search form to make it more user-friendly, and Plone 4.2 introduced changes to simplify the search results screen. You can try out the changes live on the Plone Demo site.

Better Large File Handling

Plone 4 introduced a large change in how large files are stored. Instead of serializing them into the ZODB, they are stored directly on the filesystem.

Potsdam Institute For Climate Impact Research had a 16.5 GB database containing documents and other media:

Upgrading the entire site to the new, filesystem-based storage: 51 minutes.
Plone database size: reduced from 16.5 GB to 3.0 GB.
Memory footprint on the heavily cached server: reduced from 10 GB to 3 GB.
Load on the site while in heavy use: reduced to 10-20% of the previous CPU usage, with no intermittent massive spikes, as had been the case with Plone 3.
File transfers were faster, with no discernable increase in memory usage while large documents were being downloaded.

2. Benefits for Developers

Modern Version of Python

The latest release in the Plone 4 line supports Python 2.7, which is the most current version of Python 2. This is a welcome change for many developers, as it contains many useful enhancements to the standard library coupled with many performance enhancements.

Better Packaging

The Plone 3 line included many packages that were still had not completely adopted modern Python packaging practices. This led to many problems when deploying Plone, as it could easily try to install sets of packages that were completely incompatible with your configuration. The 4.x line has reached the point where all products have been packaged using up to date practices. This means that dependency tracking is greatly simplified, and it allows you to see at a glance the exact versions of all software in use. For example, you can examine the versions.cfg file for Plone 4.2.1 which shows the version of every dependency of the CMS.

Summary

With the move from version 3 to 4, Plone solidified its position as an industrial strength CMS. While maintaining its proven security and ease-of-use advantages, Plone 4 has stepped up its technical game in terms of speed, large file handling and memory usage to handle sites which must run under even the most serious conditions. A lot of the other advances are more subtle, but the updated editor and search are sure to provide immediate improvements in usability and satisfaction compared to Plone 3. And while you many not see the under-the-hood code cleanup, updated Python and move to modern Python packaging, anyone using a Plone 3 site upgraded to Plone 4 will immediately see the results in terms of snappier response and an improved experience for users from start to finish.

Sixies by the Sea - Notes from Sea Sprint 2012

Carol Ganz — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 10:45:00 -0400

There is nothing like a targeted sprint to pull together the right people and achieve great things in a short period of time. The recent Sea Sprint, held on the coast of North Carolina was a wonderful example of how a well-planned event can deliver real results in just a few days.

Six Feet Up's Calvin Hendryx-Parker and Clayton Parker both attended the Sea Sprint September 21-24th on Oak Island, NC - joining a group of 10 sprinters. Chris Calloway handled the logistics for the weekend and kept the team well-fed; while Ian Anderson and Andy Leeb sponsored the two sprint houses.

The Sea Sprint focused on Deco - a technology with huge potential for changing how content managers manage and change the layout of their Plone websites without the need to write code.

Clayton decided to take on doing bug-fixes and unit tests as his tasks for the sprint. After upgrading plone.app.toolbar to Bootstrap 2.1.1, he worked to write tests for Deco as well as plone.app.tiles. By the end of the sprint, he had written javascript unit tests for about 90% of the Javascript code in plone.app.tiles. You can read more about the tasks, as well as Clayton's thoughts on the sprint, in his sprint report.

Calvin jumped in on pulling together documentation for Deco, which was as mostly about pruning information which had accumulated since the project began in 2008. Using Sphinx, a documentation tool which allows the aggregation of information directly from the source code, the team created a new documentation site for deco which can be seen at http://plone.github.com/buildout.deco/. You can read more about the process of doing this, as well as what makes Deco such a significant upgrade, in Calvin's sprint report.

Sprints are a great opportunity to combine a good time, community building, and moving Plone forward in tangible ways. We're glad that Six Feet Up could participate and pleased to see such significant results in such a short time.

Discovering Changes in PostgreSQL 9.2

Carol Ganz — Wed, 26 Sep 2012 10:25:00 -0400

Six Feet Up Senior Developer David Blewett recently gave our team a lively overview of the newest version of PostgreSQL (9.2) which was so informative that we decided to share it with our followers on YouTube.

David's video presentation covers new features and ones from previous versions that people may not have been aware of, as well as tips on administering PostgreSQL.

You can watch the presentation now in the Six Feet Up Youtube channel.

The PostgreSQL Global Development Group released version 9.2 of PostgreSQL on September 10th. Developers and vendors have praised it as a leap forward in performance, scalability and flexibility. The new version ships with native JSON support, covering indexes, replication and performance improvements, and many more features.

Plone Sea Sprint Night One

Calvin Hendryx-Parker — Sat, 22 Sep 2012 11:07:10 -0400

Spirited Sprint Planning

The run up to this sprint has had a great amount of discussion going on the various mailing lists to get everyone on the same page.

David Glick's list of initial possible goals:

http://plone.293351.n2.nabble.com/A-proposed-goal-for-the-Sea-Sprint-tp7559270.html

Some discssions about getting testing setup:

And some great related threads that discuss the use cases for Diazo, Dexterity and Tiles (which is what Deco uses) that are also happening around the same time:

http://plone.293351.n2.nabble.com/Diazo-Dexterity-and-tiles-through-the-web-tp7559125.html

Plus all of the planning and updates for the event can be followed here:

http://www.coactivate.org/projects/sea-sprint-2012/project-home

Dinner and Debate

We all headed to a great little Thai place not far from the house and enjoyed our kickoff dinner thanks to Dylan Jay and Pretaweb for making sure we were well fed before we got down to business. Afterward we headed back to the house to start into a many hour discussion/demos/debate about what we are “realistically” going to do during the next couple days we have together.

This session really help get everyone on the same page and brought us up to speed on Deco, Blocks, Tiles and collective.cover. A big take away from this was that all of these things are basically using the same building blocks underneath to build and deploy their content into various layouts. They all consist of using plone.tiles, plone.app.tiles and plone.app.blocks as the foundation to build a layout building system for Plone.

We also discovered that the layout portion of this, which is done by products like plone.app.deco or collective.cover is one of the more difficult bits to implement. UI and UX aren’t easy and we want a simple consice way for people to compose pages in a visual manner.

On to Day One

A big advantage of last nights session was that this morning everyone woke up already having a task assigned to them to start on. We have groups working on testing, documentation, bug fixing, prototyping new layout ideas, organizing discussions with external UI/UX folks, building more stable Tiles and starting on optimizing the installation process.

The Sea Sprint Coactivate site has a great writeup in more detail.

There is a buzz of activity this morning and I can’t wait to see how the rest of the day goes.

Blog

The Mira App: Why HTML5 Rocks

Four Plone 4.3 Benefits You Should Know About

Improved Syndication

In-Plone theme editor

Updated to TinyMCE 3.4

Dexterity content framework

About Six Feet Up, Inc.:

Women Working in Tech Event Features Sixies

4 Python Web Frameworks Compared

Pyramid - Flexible

Bottle - Simple

Django - Powerful

Flask - Nimble

Six Feet Up Supports Children's Charity

Intro to the Python Framework Pyramid

General Info

The Pyramid tenets are:

The Pyramid Configuration Supports:

Scaffolding and Templating

Persistence

Additional Resources

Why We Choose Python

1) Python is robust

2) Python is flexible

3) Python is easy to learn and use

4) Python reduces time to market

5) Python is free.

9th ShipIt Day at Six Feet Up is Complete

ShipIt Day Projects

Next ShipIt Day May 9-10th, 2013:

The Five Values That Power Six Feet Up

Top 3 Topics at Gilbane CMS Conference 2012

Zope DateTime, Careful with that Dash, Eugene

Zope DateTime

Why Upgrade to Plone 4

1. Benefits for Users

Speed

Latest Product Versions

Modern Visual Editor

Improved Search

Better Large File Handling

2. Benefits for Developers

Modern Version of Python

Better Packaging

Summary

Sixies by the Sea - Notes from Sea Sprint 2012

Discovering Changes in PostgreSQL 9.2

Plone Sea Sprint Night One

Spirited Sprint Planning

Dinner and Debate

On to Day One