If I had a single item in my wishlist for Plone 4…

… it would be: “Rethink the Document/Page”.

First, the right term for the right feature ! The Plone/AT Document is not for Documents. It is for “simple presentation pages”. That confusion was fixed in Plone 3 (IIRC) by renaming the feature to “Page”. I would argue “Page” is too vague, since the CMS always serves a page, you see what I mean. Some of you probably already have it in mind, why not “Article”.

“Article” described as in “Generic content item where you can add text, images, and links”. This is actually what Ingeniweb and others have been adding to Plone for years via the PloneArticle product. Another way of doing is with RichDocument, though I don’t have experience with it. It’s funny, everytime we build a Plone site with editorial features (most of them), we disable the “Document” content type (in the types registry) and replace it with the “Article”.

You get me ! I would like to see an implementation of Article support in Plone “à la” PloneArticle, the main use case being “easy for a content manager to add images, files, links, and maybe other pieces of content, in an article”. Presented like this, it looks like a Folder actually, but a folder with a predefined structure where the content manager do not need to think about that structure. Note that there may be other pieces of content that a content manager would like to add within an article, such as links to arbitrary Plone content (using references – PloneArticle does that), references to Documents within an exernal DMS, some photos from a Flickr account, etc…

This would probably be done in an extensible way, using a Python/Zope 3 library that allows handling references to diverse objects, decoupled of where these objects are stored. Reminds me of Alec Mitchell’s talk on plone.app.relations, something I still need to investigate !