Now it has begun: Sauna Sprint 2011 – an open source event in Finland for Plone & Python hackers and EESTEC students.

The first day of Sauna Sprint was spent introducing new EESTEC people to Plone. Almost everyone got Ubuntu installed, there was a short crash course for IRC and then we started installing Plone.

We had a bunch of EESTEC students as a test subject and our goal was to map obstacles in the process of installing Plone for local computer for development. We got some interesting results.

The data was collected on whiteboard where everyone was free to express any problem he or she had during the installation. The advisors also monitored the user group for possible problems and made notes.

Aperture Science test subjects installing Plone in hope they’ll get a cake if they success

Good job, but the cake was a lie.

1. Plone is #%!!”€&! difficult, but we can fix it

The comments below are collected from the whiteboard.

Don’t make assumptions in the documentation – people are tabula rasa (i.e. how to use cd command and so on)

Documentation needed to install gcc, PIL dependencies etc. on OS level

No good instructions how to set-up Python with virtualenv (was being fixed in the sprint). Buildout actually does not work with the system Python out of the box: you need to break your OS http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5818100/buildout-tries-to-update-system-wide-distribute-installation-and-refuses-to-run

People try to run buildout by “cd bin ; ./buildout” – it does not work and the error message is confusing

Unified Installer – ZEO installation is broken (need clarification what was broken)

Detect Python version in buildout and don’t try to run on incompatible version

When creating first Plone site input field has label “Path identifier” – people try to enter Plone FS path there

README.txt in Unified Installer needs updates

ZopeSkel template plone4_buildout should autodetect the latest Plone version (now was 4.0.1)

Update the out of the box Plone installation front page to contain more developer friendly instructions too

plone.org/downloads: Show add-on version compatibility as the first item on the page – if now compatibility set warn that the compatibility is unknown (same kind of warning if no updates for one year)

Have an easy way to report broken packages

Force a process to improve add-on documentation in p.org, especially regarding installation. Only 1/5 themes was successfully installed by the test personel without guidance, mostly due to lack of instructions and version incompatibilities.

Some work in progress on PiratePad regarding the installation of Plone.

2. Evening program

We had Sauna time in Hervanta, student style. EESTEC lived up to their reputation as party animals.

Delicious pizza was baked, though the audience loudly disagree when the pizza was burnt enough to be eaten

Magic Toni Sause

 

 

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