We were lucky enough to get together at the New Orleans Plone Symposium several people who care about and work on the installers. Ian Anderson, Joel Burton, Alexander Limi, Sidnei da Silva and I spent a few hours brainstorming concrete improvements that could be made in a short time. Several of these are now available in experimental versions of the Windows, OS X and Unified (Linux, BSD, OS X, Solaris ...) installers for Plone 3.1.4.

All are available at http://plone.org/products/plone/releases/3.1.4 . Look for “Experimental.”

Please try them out and file bug reports and improvement suggestions to http://dev.plone.org/plone -- under the appropriate “Installers” category.
Highlights of what’s available and what’s coming:

Buildout

Sidnei’s put together a buildout-based version of the Windows installer, and I’ve gotten one going for OS X, which means that all the major platforms now have a buildout capable installer.

OS X

The new version of the OS X binary installer (only available at the moment for Intel and Leopard) now has installation options including cluster or standalone and admin or user installs; it also allows you to set the Zope admin password on installation. And, it has some pretty, new Plone icons.

Unified Installer and OS X Binary

Some of the new features that are (more or less) implemented in the new “ex” OS X and Unified installers:

• A new “bin/plonectl” shell script will start and stop all Zope components
• The installed buildout.cfg files start with commented-out example add-ons for popular and development products. (The framework team will make the final choices.)
• Also in the installed buildout.cfg:
• A commented-out "unpinned" Plone definition
• buildout.cfg should have more comments and better order
• The default install will filter deprecation warnings by default. Developers may turn them back on.
• paster and ZopeSkel are managed by buildout, so that they may be updated easily.
• The default install path for the Unified Installer is now /usr/local/Plone; the OS X installer /Applications/Plone. We’ve removed the version suffix because the in-place update capabilities of buildout make it less meaningful.
• The old default page at the root of the ZODB is replaced with one that mentions Plone. (This will be refined before the 3.2 release.)