Bravo! Eric, can I suggest that you take the opportunity of the beta release to send out an email from "The Release Manager" to the wider Plone community in which you specifically remind add-on product developers to test and update their add-on products, provide a link to the upgrade docs (which already exist, right?) and celebrate the significant number of add-on products that are already Plone 4-compatible?
Here's some rough-draft text to get you started -- I just think that you're the most "authoritative" (read: shame-inducing) messenger. ;-) This should probably go to developers, users, product-developers. Maybe even plone.org/news. best, jon ===== Plonistas- Plone 4 beta 1 is now out. It's the culmination of months of hard work by dozens of Plone developers -- what we'd originally envisioned as a "boring" release is now without question the most exciting release of Plone ever: faster, more beautiful and easier to use than ever before. Thanks to all of you who've made it happen! As we enter the beta stage of our release cycle, our focus shifts, splits and widens. We need everyone -- not just core developers and framework team members -- to start testing the beta in as many routine and not-so-routine ways as possible, to find and document bugs, and to join the core developers in making fixes. Fixing bugs is a great way to make your first contributions to the Plone core. Perhaps even more importantly, it is time to focus on testing and updating add-on products for Plone 4. Most products will require only minor changes (if any). We've quietly made a great start on this already -- Plone 4 already has more compatible products at the beginning of the beta process than any previous Plone release! But there is much more to do. If you're the author of a Plone add-on product, your "to-do" list for the Plone 4 beta cycle should include: 1) Test your product against Plone 4 2) Make any necessary changes -- see http://plone.org/documentation/manual/upgrade-guide/version/upgrading-plone-3-x-to-4.0/updating-add-on-products-for-plone-4.0 for a detailed overview of the handful of minor changes you need to make -- including tips for updating themes. 3) Tag a new release of your add-on product and upload it to Plone.org. Be sure to set its version compatibility so it shows in the search at http://plone.org/products?getCategories=&getCompatibility=Plone+4! Kudos to the many folks who've *already* released Plone 4 compatible versions of their popular products, including: Steve "PloneFormGen" McMahon David "Various Groundwire Products" Glick David "PDFPeek" Brenneman Ralph "Classifieds" Jacobs Luca "custommenu.factories" Fabbri Espen "SubSkins" Moe-Nilssen Nathan "PloneTrueGallery" Van Gheem Niteoweb Roberto "Various Themes" Allende Malthe "Collage" Borch Manubu "c2.transform.office" Terada Wojciech "collective.disqus" Lichota G. "qiPortletTagClouds" Gozadinos ... and more -- see the full list at: http://plone.org/products?getCategories=&getCompatibility=Plone+4 Thanks for being out ahead of the curve! If you're an everyday Plone user, you can help by installing Plone 4 beta 1, testing your favorite add-on products, and reporting bugs to the add-on products issue tracker at http://plone.org/products. If you're not already on it, the Add-on Product Developers list is a great place to discuss add-on product compatibility and updates. http://plone.org/support/forums/addons _______________________________________________ Framework-Team mailing list Framework-Team@lists.plone.org http://lists.plone.org/mailman/listinfo/framework-team
