Behind the scenes of the Plone 3 launch

Several things about the Plone 3 launch were interesting, but weren't necessarily suitable for the main release announcement. For those of you interested in the fascinating details, I'll cover some of them here.

• The Plone 3.0 release announcement made the Digg front page with over 500 diggs.
• We handled about four times our usual number of unique visitors, and the site didn't slow down at any time during this period — big thanks to Wichert Akkerman for setting up the Varnish cache proxy to handle the traffic spike:

• The downloads are pretty evenly split between Europe and the Americas, with Asia doing about 20% as many downloads as either of those.
• We moved our main download repository from Sourceforge to Google Code.
• Plone was released on Windows, Mac OS X (both PPC and Intel), Linux and general *ix, as well as a SUSE Linux package at the same time. Thanks to efforts of the installer and packaging people, we pulled off a flawless simultaneous multi-platform release.

Other interesting facts from the code perspective:

• Over 8000 lines of code could be removed right after tagging Plone 3.0.^{1 1} For those of you wondering why it was done after the release, not before — that's the way deprecation of old code works. It ships with one release after being retired, and is then removed in the next major release. This makes it easier to support two releases at once for our add-on product authors. Big kudos to Hanno Schlichting for doing this cleanup work. Taking out old code is as important — if not more so — as adding new code.
• 17 image requests in Kupu — our visual editor component — were reduced to one single request using CSS sprites. This has a major impact on the initial load, so Kupu shows up much faster. It is similar to the reduction in HTTP requests for Plone overall that I covered earlier.
• Close to 300 changes were committed and about 50 bugs fixed the last 3 days before the release. This would have been really risky and impossible to pull off unless we had our unit tests to ensure that Plone 3.0 would still be a stable and flawless release. If you know anything about software engineering, you'll know how impressive (and slightly frightening) this is.
• Even with the record download numbers, it seems — at least so far — that Plone 3.0 is the most defect-free release we have produced so far. It's of course too early to tell for sure, but if early indications are anything to go by, this release has fewer bugs than any of our previous major releases.

A great effort by the team, and the next logical step towards Plone world domination.