Report from the Munich-leg of the Wine-and-Beer-Sprint

tl;dr: Successful Plone Sprint roundup mentioning wormhole, beer, white sausages and huge progress in the plone.* namespace :)

Last week about 40 people met from Thursday to Sunday in Syslab's Office in Munich for the Wine and Beer Sprint to push Plone forward. I was awed by the large number of people willing to attend, we actually had to close the list a few days before the event since having more than 40 people in the office would have been too bad for air-quality. As it turned out, Syslabs office is a great location to host a sprint since it not only has one huge room but also several smaller ones where groups of people could work in conclave.

We had a mixed crowd of seasoned (2/3) and first-time (1/3) sprinters. What was especially great was the attendance of some people from the local Python user group (that recently merged with the Plone user group), one of them a django-guy who took his first steps with Plone.

Munich was frozen solid during the sprint, a fact that was driven home by the people from the other leg of the sprint (in Capetown, South Africa) who were sitting in the sun wearing t-shirts grinning at us through the wormhole we set up to link the sprints. From what we could understand (wormhole-technology is still only in alpha-state) they had a great time even though they could not get ice for their drinks by stepping outside.

The sprint was very productive, here are some noteable results:

• The team working on plone.app.multilingual managed to get a release-candidate out. The next-generation translation machinery (that works for Dexterity and Archetypes) is production-ready. At Starzel.de we've been using early stages of it in production together with plone.app.contenttypes for over a year now and are very happy.
• Together with Timo Stollenwerk I was trying to get people to work on plone.app.contenttypes since I believe that Plone with dexterity-based default-types is a huge win for users (who can extend their types without paying a developer) and developers (who can focus on more challenging tasks than creating simple content-types). We managed to release 1.0b1, although not all features made it into the release and the documention needs more love. Thanks to the work of many (inluding Carsten Senger, Pavel Bogdanovic, Manuel Reinhardt, Tom Blockley, David Glick and my dear coworkers Patrick Gerken and Steffen Lindner) the package now has migrations from Archetypes, working indexes, robot-framework-tests and much more. Timo and me will work on a PLIP for it.
• A group around the tireless Nejc Zupan managed to release Version 1.0rc1 of plone.api, an effort started at the Plone Konferenz 2012 in Munich (with a "k").
• Some people worked on Patterns, a javascript-framework aiming to bring webdesign and development together. They fixed a ton of bugs and revamped their website. Rok Garbas worked on making patterns useable in Plone, most noteably plone.app.toolbar and plone.app.widgets.
• Domen Kožar worked on mr.bob [http://mrbob.readthedocs.org/en/latest/], a successor to paster.
• Besides working on plone.app.contenttypes Timo Stollenwerk also worked on getting rid of formlib and portal tools. Now all control panels have been migrated to either plone.autoform or plone.app.registry. Timo also held a tutorial on test-driven-development in which he started collective.ploneboard, a rewrite of Products.Ploneboard from scratch with Dexterity and plone.app.discussion. Plus: Timo learned that Augustiner Edelstoff is really good beer :-)
• Plone.de and the Website of the Python Software Verband have been updated, enhanced and their code moved to github.
• We saw a very promising sneak preview of new designs and mockups for Plone.com and Plone.org.
• After the last report-out with South-Africa I even managed to give a short plone-development tutorial by showing collective.team a workspace-ish behavior for Dexterity-folders, that sadly did not see any progress during the sprint.

The non-coding part of the sprint was also a success. The mountain of white sausages that we prepared for the Weisswurstfrühstück will stay in my memory forever. Contrary to the title of the sprint, coffee, Club Mate and Single Malt Whiskey were more popular than beer.

Thanks to Alex Pilz and Florian Friesdorf who not only volunteered their offices to the sprint but also did most of the organizing and were great hosts. Thanks to the Python Software Verband for sponsoring beverages and food.

The biggest thanks goes to the many sprinters who chose to spend their time to come to the sprint to improve Plone when they could have done so many other things. The spirit of friendship and the dedication of people in the Plone Community to give back continues to humble me and makes me glad and greatful to be part of that.