Here at NiteoWeb Ltd. we decided a few days ago that we should start trying out Plone 4 in order to be ready for the stable release. There are quite some new features that I can't wait to start using on production sites.

Being in adventurous mood I volunteered for the job. I also wanted to give collective.xdv a go. So the first step was to grab the Plone 4 development buildout and marry it with collective.xdv buildout for Plone 3. After some trial-and-error it started working. You basically just add collective.xdv to eggs section in buildout.cfg and that's it:

eggs =
 Plone
 plone.reload
 collective.xdv

Then I was off to code HTML template that I would use with xdv. After a few lines of CSS I remembered Limi's talk about deco.gs on the Plone Conference and still feeling adventurous I couldn't refuse the temptation to position elements in the HTML template with the Deco grid system. It didn't go as smoothly as with installing collective.xdv as there's some lack of documentation, but the general idea is simple enough that you can grasp it rather quickly.

Having a proof-of-concept for all three components I also needed a real site to try it out. So I decided to update our old corporate website. After a rainy weekend it was ready to go live. As a beta :). Hence the warning:

This site is using a bleeding-edge Plone version. Please bare with us if something isn't working properly. We are doing this to test the new version of Plone and help it make better for everyone.

TODO:

• port (if necessary) ContentWellPortlets product to Plone 4 and install it to have a dinamic footer
• port (if necessary) Scrawl blogging platform to Plone 4 and install it
• integrate Disqus commenting platform