Have you ever made an announcement and then realize how many things you left out? Well, here is the follow up to yesterday's announcement.

Big omission:

when we released, we forgot to upgrade the demo site http://us.demo.enfoldsystems.com/ . While  Enfold Desktop worked just fine with the older demo server, the more advanced features of the 4.5 version were not available,  which meant users were not seeing all the new features.  That oversight has been corrected.

One  misconception is that Enfold Desktop works only with Plone. 

This is half-true.  Desktop 4.5 works fine as a standard Webdav explorer.  We do not support this mode (i.e. don't ask for help),   but it works just fine.  In fact, I would like to see Enfold Desktop being picked up by other Content Management Systems.    

I use Enfold Desktop with mod_dav, Zope and Plone.  You can also browse Subversion. 

Try it: https://svn.enfoldsystems.com/public 

Unfortunately something is borked.  You cannot GET/PUT from DAV/SVN.  GET/PUT *does* work on mod_dav without Subversion.  Since this is not support its at the bottom of the queue.

A feature that may not be so obvious:  Scriptable context menus.

  Did you know you can add context menu's to Enfold Desktop using CMF Actions?  That's right.  Through the Web interface (portal_actions) you can actually add context menu's to your end user's Desktop!  This functionality has been there for years.  But until our documentation overhaul it was never documented. See http://www.enfoldsystems.com/software/desktop/docs/4.0/extending.html
 

If the software is not licensed the end user will see banners.

I will give you an example of two banners we added on launch of Desktop 4.5.

 

 
  The banners revolve around the Plone community and Enfold Systems product lines.  Maybe in the future we could have "Vote for Plone at Pact Publishing in 2009?"  If enough people used Enfold Desktop - we could empower end users to Vote!

Which brings me around to final question. 

Would you like Plone to ship with Enfold Desktop?  Do you think Enfold Desktop is a differentiator to other Open Source CMS?  Do you think the introductory text for Plone should talk about Enfold Desktop?  Our numbers show only about 5% of the total people downloading Windows Plone installer know about Enfold Desktop. 

• Should we add Enfold Desktop to the Plone Windows installer?  i.e. at the end of the installation notify the user they can have a Desktop integration?
• What's your thoughts?  Please bring them up on plone-users and on your blogs.
• Do you think more people would use Plone if they knew Enfold Desktop worked out of the box with Plone?

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.)