Plone Sauna Sprint final report

— filed under: planet.plone.org, Internal News

Report of the second part of the Plone Sauna Sprint.

After the first part of the Sauna Sprint we had one day off to relax, reclaim our energy and thoroughly think through what will we be doing in the final days of the sprint. To do it properly we went to the island of Iso Vasikkasaari and stayed there during the day. It felt good to stretch our limbs a bit with some beach volley after long night coding sessions in the first days of the sprint.

Finnish coastline

EESTEC

After recollecting ourselves we marched towards remaining bugs and TODO list items. Hacking continued until Sunday evening when we had the last wrapup followed by sauna in an old VW (Kleinbus) Transporter van.

VW Sauna

Work done on Plone / Python

LDAP

Florian's team continued with their work on a new LDAP story for Plone. Configuration on LDAP is now stored in plone control panel with help of bda.plone.ldap.

Jovan and Chris learned how to use tools like git, buildout, doctests, etc.

Hacking in the bunker

AJAXifying PloneFormGen

Nenad did more code polishing for his GSOC project. He'll be posting a screen-cast of the current features of PloneFormGen's UI.

Hackin on the switch

PyPI ebuilds

Domen was wrapping up code for his GSOC project and will be posting results shortly on his blog.

Translations

Andrej translated most of slovenian language files for Plone 4. He needs a bit more work to finish it up and then he'll submit it to Plone's internationalization team for review.

Hacking in the kitchen

Work done on eestec.net

Email notifications

Adam and Arlind, who are now proficient with content rules, made several new email notifications. For example, when an event or news item is published, a notification email is immediately sent to cp@eestec.net for all EESTEC's CPs to see.

Lost hacking

Content

Content team updated more content on the site, added several nice banners and call-to-action buttons.

ATGoogleMaps is now used to display a list of EESTEC's LCs. You can see it in action at Local Committees.

Hacking in the party room

Multiple CPs aka. LC Board

Old version of eestec.net only allowed one member to have special permissions on an LC (permissions like approving new members, adding events, ...). This resulted in a bottleneck scenario every time this one person was not available for a few days in a row (due to exams, illness, etc. ).

Nejc and Domen changed that behavior into a more general one: now it's a group called 'LC Board' that has this kind of permission. This enables one LC to have several members being able to do critical LC tasks on the site such as approving new members. We hope this makes the system even more usable to the end user.

Hacking in the hall

ZEO

Our site used to run on one Zope instance with 4 threads. Because of GIL problems, we switched to running 4 Zopes with 1 thread. Nejc also configured buildout to build and configure HAProxy in front to do load-balancing. Portal is now running more smoothly than ever.

Automatic deadlines

With a little bit of help from Products.cron4Plone, we now have automatic transitions when Events hit deadline. On the day of deadline, the state of Event is changed from 'open_for_applications' to 'choosing_participants' which in effect makes it impossible to apply for an event (since the deadline was reached).

Bugs

Nejc, Vedran and Vilmos sqashed most of remaining bugs and minor feature requests:

Sitsit

The participants of sitsit sit around a table. During the feast a three-course meal is served. Depending on the occasion the meal may be simple or lavish. The proceedings are led by a master of ceremonies, whose responsibility is to uphold traditions and order songs, usually based on suggestions from the participants.

Sitsits are a kind of academic table parties here in Finland and are very popular among students in Helsinki. A quote from Wikipedia on the right describes what they are all about.

Our sitsit had a special theme: NetHack, a single-player computer game from 1987. Most of us were dressed as tourists which fits into the theme just perfectly. Meals were also prepared in NetHack fashion: Dragon Soup for starters and Meatballs for the main course.

Dragon soup

A toast to meatballs

Singing

Rum tasting

After having beer tasting in the first part of the sprint it was not time to also do some proper rum tasting.

We were introduced to a special world of Rum by Mika Jansson. His humorous way of presenting different facts about rums made it all even more enjoyable. We started with cheaper white rums and gradually built our rum repertoire up to agricole rums like J. Bally. Our favorites in the end were Jamaican Appleton Estate and Guatemalan Zacapa.

Rum selection

Conclusion

Thanks again to our sponsors for helping us cover our expenses and for extra motivation they gave to Plone beginners.

Also big thanks goes out to the sprinters who endured endless hours of coding, from early mornings till late nights. You guys were great. Try to catch some sleep now.

On a last note, next EESTEC Plone sprint will likely be held in the third week of November in a Serbian town called Novi Sad in parallel with the annual EESTEC Chairpersons' Meeting. Details following when we have them.

Group photo on the island