New screencast about quintagroup.plonegooglesitemaps product for Plone. If compared to a Plone Google Sitemaps previous screencast, this new one covers Plone Google Sitemaps package installation on buildout-based instance for Plone 3. Also, apart from explaining creation of Content Sitemap, we added example of creating News Sitemap and showed News Sitemap peculiar features, as well as new configlet added to News Items objects for defining News Item specific features.

In this screencast we also describe how to register Plone site in Google Webmaster Tools area, how to validate it and submit Sitemap.

Helpful links

• Plone Google Sitemaps home page and documentation area
• Post feedback about this product in TalkQuintagroup Plone Forums Plone Google Sitemap area
• More screencasts from Quintagroup can be found in the Screencasts section.

In this screencast you will find information about Schools Plone Theme's basic features, installation instructions and main customizations. You will learn how to manage site's carousel banners, how to use additional portlets manager, how to change top area image and logo.

Helpful Links

• Schools Plone Theme home page
• More screencasts from Quintagroup can be found in the Screencasts section

quintagroup.seoptimizer

To begin with I would like to announce that one of our most widely used products - quintagroup.seoptimizer is now upgraded to work with Plone 4. Its 4.0 version doesn't bring any new functionality but allows to use it on Plone 4 - based sites.

quintagroup.plonegooglesitemaps

Another popular product quintagroup.plonegooglesitemaps has gone through a number of updates and its 1.3 version, released on June 01, comes with several new features for New Sitemaps. News Sitemap created by a new 1.3 version of  quintagroup.plonegooglesitemaps is now generated according to the new News Google Sitemaps specifications.

There are some specific meta tags (such as  <n:access>, <n:genres>, <n:stock_tickers>, etc.), required by new Google Sitemaps standard, that are not available in Plone's default NewsItem content type. That is why starting from 1.3 version quintagroup.plonegooglesitemap brings special additional configuration menu to NewsItems for defining NewsSitemap-specific meta tags.

Such additional configuration menu is added only to News Item content type by default quintagroup.plonegooglesitemap settings since News Sitemap is expected to include News Items only. But if needed, this configuration menu can be added to other content types (if you plan to include them into the News Sitemap). See instruction for making this on News Google Sitemaps documentation area.

Please note: Starting from this release to install quintagroup.plonegooglesitempas you will have to to add 'quintagroup.plonegooglesotemaps-overrides' line to your buildout's ZCML area. See detailed Installation Instructions.

Together with quintagroup.plonegooglesitemaps 1.3 version, we released 0.7 version of quintagroup.canonicalpath. So, please consider updating these two packages.

collective.referencedatagridfield

collective.referencedatagridfield - is a completely new package, that is a mix of Reference and DataGrid fields for Plone. It allows to add external sources (as well as internal) as related items to Plone's objects. Custom titles can be set to the related items instead of their real titles. Also it allows to easily change related items order.

The package's aim is to help Plone developers to extend default Plone Reference field functionality or override existing Reference field functionality with a custom one. It does not bring this functionality to the Plone content types, but allows Plone developers to do that simply by following the example content type creation.

More about collective.referencedatagridfield

• Product's home page
• Download initial public release from plone.org project area or from PyPi project area
• Get the latest development version from SVN Repository
• Read documentation about this package
• Submit tickets to Issue Tracker

Quintagroup organized a half-day event with 4 talks for current and potential members of Ukrainian Plone Users Group.

The first one to present his report was Serhiy Valchuk who talked about New Features of Plone 4. He mainly concentrated on functional and UI improvements that Plone 4th version brings: new items in Plone Control Panel, Image Handling options, TinyMCE visual editor overview and new features in portlets management.

Then Olha Pelishok presented her Overview of Calendaring add-ons for Plone. She provided many screenshots and illustrative examples of the following products usage on Plone 3 websites: CalendarX, Plone4Artists Calendar, zopyx.multieventcalendar, and vs.event.

After that Ihor Berehuliak started his Search Engines Optimization of Plone sites report. He spoke a lot about peculiarities of SEO for Plone sites. Ihor described main reasons that have influence on search results and how to improve Plone site SE crawling with default Plone tools and with the help of quintagroup.seoptimizer, quintagroup.plonegooglesitemaps, quintagroup.canonicalpath and Redirection Tool add-ons. A big part of presentation was devoted to work with Google Webmaster Tools and robots.txt in standard Plone site. Also, Ihor made some suggestions about what is needed to be improved in Plone in terms of SEO

The last one to present his ideas was Myroslav Opyr, whose speech was particularly interesting for Quintagroup's developers team. Myroslav talked about automating of development process, testing and Plone sites administering: Continuous Integration, Bitten, Code Review, Fabric, RSS/Jabber, etc.

Photos from World Plone Day 2010 in Lviv are available at http://www.flickr.com/photos/quintagroup/sets/72157623955266658