I will be setting up a development site to play with the latest and greatest of Plone and its products. In particular, I would like to get Karen Kilroy and Michael Lehto, a Cleveland Institute of Art student at least familiar with Plone. I worked with both of them on a project, but that was using Drupal. Don't get me wrong, Drupal is a nice system, but I am a plone bigot and just like it. So it would be nice if my developer friends had some experience with it.

Plone 2.1.3 has been released. It appears that it is mostly a maintenance release and some fixes to Kupu have been implemented. It'll be interesting to see since my wife uses kupu to post to her blog. It also appears that some other small changes have been made that may require re-customization of some of the "portlets". We'll see.

You may experience some downtime of neohawk as I upgrade. Then again, since nobody actually reads the site I am not overly concerned! ^_^;

After fixing the problem with Dapper on the averatec I discovered yesterday, I tried to upgrade to Plone 2.1.3. but it didn't work.

I ran the test migrate script and saw no errors. However, when I ran it for real, first my browser timed out. I tried it a couple of different times, but it never seemed to get through it, even waiting quite a while for it to finish. I then started getting unicode errors, which I don't remember off the top of my head. I will attempt it again today, since I was able to upgrade some other sites to Plone 2.1.3.

The interesting thing is that while I was getting unicode errors, it was only on the English portion of the site. The Japanese portion of the site worked just fine....I have a feeling that some product or something I have in here is not right and ruining the upgrade. If the migration doesn't work again, I will remove the products I installed just for testing to see if that works.

But I can't figure out why Japanese would be okay, but not English....

Saw today that Plone 2.5 RC3 was released. That's the third release of the next version of Plone this month. The Plone community is cranking it out, I guess because that means we are awfully close to a final release.

And to think, I haven't gotten this site up to Plone 2.1.3 yet.....sigh.

Okay, I tried it again. For some reason I was able to upgrade to Plone 2.1.3 successfully today. Now, I need to get ready for upgrading to Plone 2.5....

Plone in the news.

Plone 2.5 Released

Oh, joy. Plone 2.5 has been officially released. 2.5 is the latest and greatest version of Plone, one of the premier content management systems. Plone powers neohawk.org. I am currently running 2.1.3, and have yet to test 2.5. According to the release, Plone 2.5 can run on Zope 2.9.3 with Python 2.4.2, or Zope 2.8.7 on Python 2.3.5. Of course, the question is whether the "products" or modules, are compatible with this new version of Plone. I have read on the Japanese mailing list for Coreblog that Coreblog runs fine on Plone 2.5. My real concern though is the other products I use like photoablum.

Guess there is one way to find out.....set up a test site.

Limi Hired by Google

What is big news for those of us that follow Plone, Alexander Limi, one of the founding developers and visionaries behind Plone has been hired by Google. Limi-san posted the news himself on Plone.org. According to that post, he is paid to work on Plone one full day a week while at Google. He states that, in fact, it is more time than he spends on Plone now....which I must say is hard to believe considering the output.

Good luck and congratulations, Limi-san

Plone Foundation is now a 501c

Paul Everitt announced that the IRS has notified the Plone foundation that it is now, officially, a 501c organization. Plone Foundation owns the various intellectual property around Plone. Paul blogs about it and Limi's new job.

Hotfix affecting Plone Released

A hotfix for Zope that impacts Plone was released recently. It relates to restructured text. I have already applied it to my server. More information on the hotfix is available on Zope.org. Check it out if you haven't seen it yet.

Well, its Firday. And believe it or not, I am actually posting before a whole week has gone by since my last post...just barely.

Probably the biggest news was that Elly came back on the 21st, and we celebrated her 15th birthday on Wednesday. We got to see my Mom twice this last week, as she came over on Sunday to check email since her cable interenet was apparently taking a day off...it came back on later. We called my brother George, who is the Executive Director at New Jersey Future, for his birthday. We saw here again for dinner on Elly's birthday. We'll see her again tomorrow and Sunday as well.

We'll get to see Mom again tomorrow when we have dinner at her house. My uncle Sherman, former professor of Shakespeare at Princeton, Rochester and Wesleyan, is in town with his wife, Anne a professor at University of Pennsylvania. Anne has some events to attend here in Cleveland, so Sherman is bowing out of the social events to come have dinner with us. Sherman was a Professor at Wesleyan while I was there and I like to think we got close. Regardless of what Sherman thinks, he is one of my favorite people. Well, actually so is Anne and the rest of their family.

Anyway, will see Mom again on Sunday and probably Monday. Ken has his first soccer games with the U14 Travel Team for the Mayfield Soccer Club. Of course, all three of Mom's sons played soccer, partially influenced by her father who played for the Glasgow Rangers, and then emigrated to the U.S. to play for the Bethlehem Steel Soccer club. So Mom likes soccer and must be pleased to be able to one of her grandkids play. Of course, my brother Dan's kids all play. In fact, they are currently in the UK for his daughter's games. I am not clear on the details but it appears that her soccer club is off playing some UK teams, so they took the whole family. Nice. Anyway, Mom is coming to see Ken's games so we'll see her again.

One of the nice things about being back in the U.S. is the chance to see family alot more than we did than when we were in Japan. Heck, even the phone calls are more often since its substantially cheaper. In fact, my sister Harriet called Elly to wish her a happy birthday.

Other than than, I spent the week playing around with a bunch of systems. Drupal, civicrm, sugarcrm, etc. I installed XOOPS, played around with OSPI's new website, and set up a survey for a customer using phpESP. Pretty much dead easy to set up a survey using phpesp. I dropped in a whole bunch of modules for Plone, testing out new features and functions for a new site I am planning. As part of that, I added ATGoogleMaps and added a map here at neohawk. I intend to start adding more markers over time. I have been having an ongoing, online discussion with Takanori Susuki as he gets ready to develop 0.6 of ATGoogleMaps.

Last night, I finally was able to get a jabber server up and running. I had one in Okinawa, but it went away in the move back to the U.S. I was having problems with jabber 1.4.3, and jabberd2, so I went with eJabberd(drupal site by the way). Unfortunately I have not yet successfully implemented the gateways to MSN, Yahoo, AIM, ICQ and IRC. I will get there though.The nice thing about ejabberd is it supports virtual domains so I can use the same server for my various domains. Iishf your interested, try registering with jabber.neohawk.org using your jabber client. Or if you already have a jabber account somewhere you can try adding robataka@jabber.neohawk.org to you buddy list. If you do add an account, please realize it may not be permanent as I continue to finalize configuration and adding plugins to it. I will try not to delete anybody who does register though, just no promises.

I also spent some time following this thread over at BFD. My gut reaction was much along the lines of Jim Kenny's reaction - partnering with Starbuck is a good marketing move, but when I actually read the article I saw the same thing another commenter pointed out. It is only being rolled out to ten Starbucks in the Cleveland area. My initial assumption was that it was a national campaign, hence I liked the idea. But only 10 locations in Cleveland? Hell, I even checked out starbucks.com's press release pages and there was nada, nothing. Of course, I have no problems with them partnering with Starbucks or anyone else for that matter. I would also imagine that with the cleveland.com article,BFD discussion etc., I would assume that CMOA will also eventually partner with local coffee shops. What I'd rather see though is a nationwide agreement, hell even Internationally. Wouldn't it be great to have my friends in Okinawa see a CMOA poster in the Mihama Starbucks.

The other thread I'll be watching with interest is this one. But I gotta say, BFD seems to have gotten even more active over the last couple of months. Maybe its is problems with my memory, but there seems to be alot more animated discussions going on over than I remember. And I particularly like the new tech postings by Douglas Carver. Kind of replaces Henry Gomez's Tech Link blog.

Wow, I was just going to do a quick post and look at what drivel it turned into.....

I first saw this at Ploneblog, but also on Slashdot. It seems that a Federal Judge in California has ruled that online retailers must conform to the requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act. In web terminology this is generally called accessibility.

The plaintiffs charge that target.com fails to meet the minimum standard of web accessibility. It lacks compliant alt-text, an invisible code embedded beneath graphic images that allows screen readers to detect and vocalize a description of the image to a blind computer user. It also contains inaccessible image maps and other graphical features, preventing blind users from navigating and making use of all of the functions of the website. And because the website requires the use of a mouse to complete a transaction, blind Target customers are unable to make purchases on target.com independently.

What Jon and Ploneblog is referring to when he says "Yet another way that Plone is ahead of the curve." in reference to the article, is that Plone out of the box conforms to Section 508's, and the W3C's Accessibility standards. Note, that is out of the box, so any customization that is done to a Plone site may not continue that conformance. And it has been my experience that it is real easy to fall out of conformance. Just forget to put an alt tag in your image src and wham, that page's conformance is gone.

Clearly, this ruling targets, pun intended, online retailers. This is a good thing for increased open standards. Which I like because the more websites have to adhere to open standards the more likely it is my browser will not have problems with a site, unlike those that are designed for Internet Explorer.

But my first reaction to this was what about campaign sites. It is hard to be a reader in the NEO blogosphere and not come across campaign websites. So upon reading this, my reaction was when is a suit going to be filed against campaign sites. Now of course, suing Target most likely means that there is a chance to get mulah, since it is a commercial venture. In the case of a campaign website, is there anything to sue over? Creating barriers to participating in elections? I don't know, but it would strike me as a weak case, but then again what do I know.

What I do know is that the vast majority of campaign websites I have come across don't adhere to html standards. Hell, why am I saying "vast majority". I don't remember a single campaign site that conforms to any standard, be it HTML 4.0 or XHTML. Ted Strickland's site has 30 errors, while Ken Blackwell's has more. Since Blackwell's site doesn't have a doctype declaration, there is now way to know which html version he is using. The first brush shows 49 errors, but I am not sure where that is coming from. If you force XHTML 1.0 tranisitional, it comes back with over 300 errors. Using HTML 4.01 transtional, there are only 132 errors. Furthermore, Blackwell's site has a mismatch in the http header encoding and the site encoding. (Note these results are for the top page of both sites only.)

If you want to test this yourself, head over to W3C's Validator Service.

Since the html doesn't validate there is now way to check the validity of those sites via the W3C's css validator unless I download the css from the sites and then upload them. If they had valid (x)html, I would be able to just insert the url into the css validator. I am just not that motivated to go that far.

Using Firefox's webdeveloper toolbar extension, Ted Strickland's top page fails to conform to both Section 508 and the WAI standards. Needless to say probably, but Ken Blackwell's page similarly fails both Section 508 and WAI. Which is not suprising.

Now, before I get the "that's the pot calling the kettle black", I am aware that Neohawk may not be fully compliant. While the underlying templating technology in zope/plone, zope page templates or ZPT, makes it a lot easier to obtain conformance, it doesn't help with user created html. For example, if you look at the results of Strickland's page, all the errors come down to forgetting to at an "alt" tag to images. If his webmaster fixes that, and closes out a td tag, for the most part his site will be standards compliant. In the case of neohawk, I generally type in my own html tags but I have been known to forget to add an alt tag, though I do generally take care to add them. It is also as simple as using <br>(html 4.0.1) instead of <br /> which is xhtml 1.0 transitional. So yes, Neohawk may not be 100% valid. In particular, css conformancy is pretty bad, which I really should get around to fixing.

But Jon is right, Plone makes it alot easier to get there.

Update

I checked out the html validity of this blog (http://www.neohawk.org/Members/rbh/rbh-s-blog), and got 17 errors. The vast majority of those errors are due to urls within the content. For example, you will run across many urls such as my link to a Crain's article in an earlier post:

<a href="http://www.crainscleveland.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060828/SUB/60825022/1005&Profile=1005">

xhtml validation will barf on those ampersands which need to be "escaped" by changing the & to &. This example shows why it is so easy to create non-conforming content, regardless of the underlying template code. And there is nothing to do about it except the content creator needs to take the time to try and fix each of those. Which is, often, a thankless and time-consuming task.