Plone IDE is an ACE Javascript editor based effort to provide easy and sane Plone development environment aimed for newcomers (though power users will probably enjoy it too). It started as a proof-of-concept. In Plone Conference 2011 people are sprinting to bring it to the level of usability that it can be reliably used in everyday development. Plone IDE effort was bootstrapped by Franco Pellegrini who got chipped in to the conference by the awesome Plone community.

After various stakeholders had a chance to come together around a round table a vision of Plone IDE was formed. Here are my draft slides about Plone IDE and its relationship to other on-going Plone community efforts. Please see my slides of Easy Way which try to explain the background of bringing Plone closer to an everyday web developer from Plone’s current Python expert only mode.

The problem: Current Plone development workflow is optimized for expert level Python developers with powerful tools providing high probability of cutting off your thumbs accidentally. Before getting the taste of Hello World, the newcomer developers must fight they way of lot of unrelated matters and hope have the thumbs intact in the end of the day.

• See brief Plone IDE introduction video

Solution: Provide a single (zip) package which contains everything you need to get started. Just start Plone, open the editor and copy-paste in the code from the tutorial. The development workflow must match the actual work you need to be able to change anything in Plone: it is not limited to changes you can do in the site database.

If you are interested in this project please contact me or Franco through Twitter. We also lurk in IRC on #plone channels.

BTW Most of the actual IDE code is not Plone specific, so this might turn out as a drop-in editor for any Python web development project

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