Following voting on Plone Improvement Proposals, the features accepted for Plone 4 have been announced.

The Plone Foundation is happy to announce that following the framework team has selected 40 proposals for improving Plone in the upcoming Plone 4, the largest number accepted in the history of the project.

While Plone 4 was initially planned to make already implemented features of Plone 5 available significantly sooner, the improvement proposals accepted also include brand new features and improvements.

The different users of Plone were considered carefully when deciding on proposals to ensure the best experience for users, integrators and add-on product developers alike.

Plone 4 will ship with a new default skin, based on that of plone.org, and use the TinyMCE editor instead of Kupu.  The user interface of collections and search will be improved, as will management of portlets.

Integrators will benefit from new control panels designed to make upgrading to Plone 5 easier, the ability to control dashboards for whole groups of users, and the ability to customise the roles and memberdata of a site without modifying templates.

Not all improvements are visible to users, however, Plone 4 will use Python 2.6, giving a speed increase as well as more flexibiltiy for developers.  The XHTML for logged in users will be improved to fix validation errors and various patches will be integrated into core, making third party product code cleaner and more readily understandable.

These features will be implemented over the coming weeks, with the deadline for submission of implementations being the 16th August.  Plone 4 is slated for release on 1st December 2009, with preview versions being available around the time of Plone Conference 2009.