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1. A Big HTML editor update: Kupu 1.4

For a lot of everyday Plone users, Kupu (Plone’s graphical HTML editor) is Plone. And in Plone 3, Kupu packs in a lot of improvements. All of the changes in Kupu could fill up an article on its own, but the highlights surely include:

• Named anchors
• Automatic image resizing
• Image captions
• Inserting of Flash and other embeddable video (e.g. YouTube)
• Span/character styles

Together with all of Kupu’s existing goodness, most emphatically including its ability to produce valid XHTML code, Plone 3 defines “best of breed” for graphical HTML editing in a CMS.

Here are a few screenshots of Kupu in action, to whet your appetite. Click on each image to see the full-size view.

Linking to an anchor — in this page or in any other page on your site!

Adding and removing anchors from a page.

Creating a table of contents from headings in a page.

A table of contents, automatically built by Kupu from headings in your document.

Automatic resizing of images using PIL.

Captioned images — a frequently requested feature!

2. Rich Text fields on Collections

Ok, so this is a small feature. But it really makes me happy. Collections (formerly known as Smart Folders, formerly known as Topics), which are simple build-your-own query listings of content, now have a Rich Text field, which means you can very easily write a nicely formatted introduction to a dynamic listing of content. This is going to make it really easy for non-technical site administrators to build polished, lively sites without knowing a lick of code.

A Collection with a Rich Text intro.

3. The new “Sharing” tab

Plone has long had a fantastic system for creating really precise permissions on content. Plone 3 surfaces a lot of that power in a simple way for everyday users. Check out the all-new “sharing” tab.

Nice! You can use this single, elegant screen to add give new users & groups the permission to view, to edit and to add new content in a folder. That’s all you need to cover a pretty huge set of intranet/extranet situations.

To see how radically this has improved in Plone 3, check out the old sharing tab from Plone 2.5:

Holy cow! That’s about 4x as large as in Plone 3, and it doesn’t even do as much! Kudos to Alex Limi and Danny Blomendaal for the big cleanup.

4. New built-in workflows

Plone 3’s elegant new sharing tab is more than complimented by powerful new workflows. Once again, the Plone team has surfaced powerful underlying systems in a friendly, accessible way. Plone 2.5 shipped with one standard workflow. Plone 3 ships wtih several simple workflows, designed to support common user stories including simple publication sites, community sites, and intranet/extranets.

Choosing among Plone 3’s new workflows.

You can associate these workflows with different content types, or use the included CMFPlacefulWorkflow add-on Product to assign different workflows to different folders. This makes it easy to build a single Plone site that has a public-facing section and a rich, private collaboration space.

Assigning a custom workflow to a folder.

5. Link integrity: no more broken links

Plone 3 has a powerful new “link integrity” feature that makes sure you never break hyperlinks within your site as you move or delete content. Here’s what happens when you try to delete an image that is used in several pages.

6. Versioning, staging and locking

Plone 3 ships with big-league document management features, starting with document versioning. Versioning allows you to save old versions of a page, compare your current version to older versions, and even to roll back to previous versions. Plone 3.0’s versioning is drawn from CMFEditions, the well-established add-on Product, spiffed up with some nice new user interface.

Plone 3’s history tab showing all previous revisions of your document.

Plone 3 can also show you exactly what’s been added and removed between versions. Nerds call this a “diff” (short for “difference”)!

Plone 3.0 is also scheduled to include document staging, the ability to work on a copy of a document while the old version is still live, via Kapil Thangavelu’s product “iterate.”

Finally, Plone 3.0 includes locking, which prevents two people from making changes to a document at the same time. Together, versioning, staging and locking will make Plone 3.0 very appealing to folks who are managing sophisticated sites with multiple people editing content at the same time.

7. Automatic full-text searching of Word and PDF files

Plone 3 automatically indexes the entire text of Word and PDF files that you upload. (You can index other kinds of documents, too, with simple add-on Products.) Again, this is a killer feature for intranets, and for any other site that has a lot of document-centric content to share with the world.

UPDATE: Thanks to Daniel Nouri for pointing out that this only happens auto-magically if you have wvware (for Word) and pdftoext or xpdf already installed on your system.

8. User control of portlets

Plone 3 has a entirely new “portlets” system. Portlets are those little chunks of content that appear in the sidebars of a site. You used to have to go into the ZMI backend to manage them. Now you just click on “Manage Portlets,” then drag and drop your way to glory.

Plone 3 ships with one new kind of portlet, an RSS feed portlet. There’s lots of room for add-on Product developers and site integrators to develop interesting and innovative new portlets.

This feature alone is going to make a lot of our clients very, very happy.

Summing Up

Plone 3 is the most ambitious, exciting release of Plone ever. It pushes Plone to an incredible new level of power, and continues the ongoing processes of polishing Plone’s legendary ease-of-use to a high gloss.

Plone 3.0 RC1 is meant for testing, not production use. There are still a few weeks of fast-paced bug-hunting ahead. That’s where you come in. Download it. Install it. Play with it. Report bugs. Fix ‘em if you can. Plone 3 should be released sometime in early/mid August. I’m excited.