PloneFormGen's internals are getting long-in-the-tooth, and need to be advanced to take advantage of Zope 3 and Plone 3 technologies.

Some early ideas for architectural work:

• Switch the internal form representations to Z3 schema's maintained in the form object, rather than the field objects, with synchonization maintained by en event system;
• Use z3c.form and plone.z3cform for presentation.

The combination of these would give PFG an efficiency of operation comparable to native formlib / z3.form fields. We may have an earlier sprint to work out the architectural details on this so that the DC sprint may be concretely productive. Let SteveM know if you're interested.

Other things that should happen during this refactoring:

• Development of a mechanism for presenting forms in viewlets and portlets;
• Developing a strategy for incorporating in-line validation;
• Brainstorming on what a form editor AJAXified with KSS might look like (optilude thinks we may be able to share code with Dexterity);
• Brainstorming form import/export.
  

We'd be able to use folks that know or would like to learn Z3 schemas and forms; anyone who can write tests; anybody that's got ideas for how PFG should meet the future; and anybody who'd like to develop docs. I'd particularly love anyone sufficiently dedicated to the long-run health of the project to help write migrations.

By the way, my bottom-line standard for this refactoring work is that we must have a very close to 100% reliable migration path from existing PFG, and the product must end up easier -- not harder -- for end users. If you'd like a new feature, try to come up with a plan for incorporating it that won't increase complexity.

Please sign up if you're interested!

Interested

Steve McMahon (stevem on #plone and OpenPlans, smcmahon on plone.org) - Release Manager

Andrew Burkhalter (andrewb on #plone and OpenPlans, andrewb on plone.org)

Alex Clark (aclark) - Cheer leading and coding, time-permitting :-)

Kelly Craig (kcraig) - Will be there, glad to help any way I can, have a few ideas to make it easier :)

Ed Crewe (edcrewe) - Should be there, coding if needed.