It is time to separate! Part of our team - our dear developers team - moves from our good old office into a brand new one! The repairs completed, new furniture is in, everything clean and light - so we move in! We used to be all together at 3 adjacent rooms for more than 3 years. Now that the company grows, and there are more and more of us, our old office became toocramped and too noisy... 

So, our brand-new office room. It is located in the same building as the old one, but one stage higher. We're separated now but still close enough. :) Space, glorious space! Big and light room with 10 working places and a cozy kitchen-restroom. 

You might have see our new office room, as we celebrated World Plone Day 2009 there. But then, 1 month from now it lacked furniture and green plants; now it is all packed. Everything on its place and everybody at their working desks.

So, thanks to everyone who worked hard so that now we can arrive everyday to this pleasant place!

Cumulus Portlet (quintagroup.portlet.cumulus) from Quintagroup allows you to add tag cloud portlets to display your site's tags, categories or both using a Flash movie that rotates them in 3D. It works just like a regular tags cloud, but it is more visually exciting. This is the WordPress WP-Cumulus plugin ported to Plone as a portlet.

When you add this portlet anywhere in the site it will display all site's tags. You are free to set cumulus portlet options so that it fits your site design, color scheme etc. Among portlet options you can find:

• Width and height of the flash tag cloud portlet
• Smallest and largest tag size
• You can set main and optionally second color of the tags for creating multi-colored tag cloud; optional highlight color when mouse is over it and background portlet color
• Possibility to enable transparent or compatibility mode
• Rotation speed. Remember that clicking the tags might turn to be a little hard, depending on your speed setting :).

P.S. Click on the image on the right to be taken to the page with portlet cumulus demo.

Portlet Cumulus is now on PyPi. Give it a go!

Quintagroup has recently finished migration of Companies Incorporated official website to the new theme. Visit http://www.companiesinc.com/ website to see the new outstanding design featuring:

• Companies Incorporated front page has a special block developed to be displayed under site global navigation. This block contains person's photo and personal data (this is one of random sets that changes with every page refresh). There is also a text of different styles added with a guarantee label at the bottom.
• Site home page main content area is subdivided into several sections, it is organized as a composite page with the help of CompositePack product. 
• Above-footer set of portlets was added, including 3 static text portlets. This is a right column of portlets displayed under the content area. These portlets can be managed as usual portlets in Plone. See three bottom portlets on all site inner pages.
• Contact form block was added to site subsections (e.g. Incorporate section), containing a form, created with PloneFormMailer product. The form was nicely designed to be subdivided into 2 columns. Form description is context-sensitive (compare Incorporate and Limited Liability Company sections). Each site section can have different text  displayed as form description.
• Companies Incorporated is a multilingual website, containing content in English ans Spanish languages. Drop-down menu that allow to shift between two languages is available on all site inner pages.
  

This year Plone community decided to continue tradition of celebration of World Plone Day, aimed to promote Plone. Ukrainian Plone Users Group joined the celebrations and organized a meeting in Lviv, Ukraine. It was one of approximately 45 seminars that took place around the world on all continents. About 20 attendees were present at the seminar, where 3 reports were presented.

• VItaliy Podoba - web-developer in Quintagroup - talked about new features (11 PLIPs) implemented in Plone 3.3. He also introduced the way Plone is developed nowadays, paying attention to innovations planned to be included into the next big release of Plone 4. Slides from this presentation are here:  New in Plone 3.3. What to expect from Plone 4".
  
• Yuriy Gvozdovych - HTML and CSS coder in Quintagroup - devoted his presentation to Plone-based websites for mobile devices. He talked about popular mobile operation systems and their browsers. He also highlighted specifics of developing Plone sites for mobile purposes. Slides from this presentation are here: Overview of Plone-based websites for mobile devices".
  
• Olha Pelishok - Content Manager in Quintagroup - presented the most popular Plone ecommerce solutions. Specifics of internet shops organization were discussed. Most attention was paid to PloneGetPaid and EasyShop add-ons. Slides from this presentation are here: "Ecommerce Solution for Plone".
  

More photos from World Plone Day 2009 in Lviv are at http://www.flickr.com/photos/quintagroup/sets/72157617126947845

Ping Tool

Ping Tool (quintagroup.pingtool) was modernized and is now available as an eggified package for Plone 3 series. See release 1.1.3 which has adapters, utilities, uninstall configlet, modified tests, and integration with Outbound Syndication (Vice) added.

quintagroup.pingtool package is based on formerly known qPingTool product.

Plone SEO

quintagroup.seotimizer package had more releases issued - 2.0.4 and 2.0.5. New releases include some improvements ans modernization of SEOptimizer product from Quintagroup. Adding of a new feature is worth mentioning here which is canonical URL, useful for search engine marketing purposes.

Theme 3 Template

quintagroup.themetemplate - is a brand new package from Quintagroup. This is an enhanced "Plone 3 Theme" template from Zopeskel.

This package includes addcontent local command, which allows to extend base Plone theme by additional elements, such as: skin layers, portlets, viewlets, css and js resources, and objects in zexp files. This package is an analogue of Archetype template in terms of its functionality.

Helpful Links

• Download tar archives from quintagroup.themetemplate project area

• Read about this package and download eggs from PyPi quintagroup.themetemplate project area

• Get the latest development version from SVN repository

• Post feedback about product in Quintagroup Plone Forums