On the off chance that you don't grace the Plone list for NGOs or missed the training opportunity on plone.org and weren't able to join, Joel Burton of PloneBootcamps.com and myself were asked to help N-TEN represent Plone in it's "Ask the Expert" session.  The transcript for the 1 hour session is now available.  Check it out if you're interested.

So, how did it go?

Personally, it was an honor and I rather enjoyed taking part in the session, despite feeling a bit hesitant about the "expert" labelling.   A few additional thoughts and reactions to the session follow:

• Joel Burton, of course, was his usual brilliant self at explaining complicated concepts in the somewhat challenging IRC format. 
  
• Making the previous point even more impressive ... my only complaint was continually feeling frustrated with the difficulties of articulating answers over the same format.  N-TEN was using a web-based IRC client called Gabbly, which doesn't support tab completion of screen nicks.  It's incredible how big a difference that makes to perceived typing speed :)
  
• There were significantly fewer blanket "compare Plone to Drupal and Joomla" questions than I anticipated.  Those questions are fine, but without specific feature requirements and use-cases, it's quite difficult to accurately represent where Plone definitely excels from a content editor perspective (besides the fantastic usability, that is!).  Hint: it excels at everything ;^)
• It was a lot more of pointing people in the right direction to self-serve, rather than specifically answering their questions.  The scope is obviously vast.  We made a solid pitch to get people to the already incredible and existing resources that the Plone community offers including the lists and the #plone IRC channel.
• Hosting.  I knew it would come up and it's one of the more challenging ones to answer as it comes down to very fundamental differences to the architecture of Plone versus some other systems with which people may already be familiar.  It's great that we can point folks to Webfaction, High Speed Rails, Six Feet Up, as well as NPower -- all of which credible serve the nonprofit sector.   Additionally, it's great that your typical nonprofit can understand that the potential benefits of the Plone stack are worth the additional $10-20 USD/month, that sometimes commodity LAMP hosting has its drawbacks, and want to invest in their web presence.  Despite all of this, I still think there's an incredible opportunity for all the would-be Plone hosting providers to come into this space and greatly contribute to the story of the platform for the one off site.  
  
• In talking with N-TEN's director of programs, I was told it was quite well received by attendees and compared favorably with the other sessions on Drupal & Joomla.

Mike Pelletier recently sent a great email out to the plone-users list:

CaseWare International is working on a number of Plone products and enhancements.  They are all intended to be released under the GPL. 

We presently have four full-time developers on our "OpenEngagement" project, and several more working on Plone projects for clients. 

We are interested in coordinating development with other developers to reduce wasted effort.  I would like to take the list on a brief tour of our open and future projects.

If you have a libre project similar to one of ours and would like to reach your goals sooner, or if you can get value from one of our projects and want to see it released sooner, please get in touch...

What then followed as a tour-de-force of great Plone product ideas, some with code, and some just conceptual.

Regardless, it is great to see add-on Product developers taking this kind of initiative to start conversations about collaboration BEFORE writing and releasing code.

Paul Everitt asked me to do some storytelling about Plone.NET and I agreed to do this because I need some practice - I'm becoming a dad in 4 months time. Hopefully the story is as colourful, scary and hopeful as most fairy tales, and as real.

In short the best introduction to the blog posts that I will attempt in the time to come, is from Paul's request to me:

"Initiatives like plone.net take some work to make them feel solid. As the insiders work, they need to know more about the big picture and also need to get some positive reinforcement, that their work is valued. Then, as things get closer to reality, the outsiders need to know what it is, why they should care, how it is evolving, etc. They need to see energy for plone.net to feel real. In short, we need to do some storytelling."

At the Plone conference in Seattle two weeks ago, there was strong agreement that we need to market Plone better, or as Alan Runyan put it "pour gasoline on the fire". So even though all Plone consultants and companies are already inundated with work, we want more!

Are we greedy? No. We really love Zope and Plone and what it is becoming and we want this to grow. We don't necessarily know how to do this but we definitely have a few bright people and tons of dedication amongst us that should keep us going. And hopefully we remain humble enough to ask those who know.

As a first initiative to introduce more of Plone to the world, we need to populate Plone.NET. So create an account and contribute what you can. This is the place where you can brag about what you are doing with Plone for the benefit of Plone, yourself and your own organisation. And if it is not working as expected please report it so that we can get it fixed.

I'm not going to assume that everyone will automatically contribute to Plone.NET. I can imagine a few obstacles that might prevent you from publishing case studies and sites to Plone.NET. The most common one will probably be that you don't have enough time, which is understandable since you already doing so much Plone work. Solution: MAKE time. Please :-)

You might be reluctant to contribute to Plone.NET because your competitors are listed there. Hey, there is something wrong with your thinking here. The goal of Plone.NET is to grow the market so that it can sustain all of us. More Plone companies alone will not help grow the market - we need to showcase our collaboration on Plone.NET.

I have a feeling that we have a very unique organisation of businesses around Plone. Many Plone companies are betting there whole business on Zope and Plone and are actively contributing to it's growth. This is very different to companies using more established technologies while being very far from the center of the development and the developer community. When people start using Plone they are drawn closer to the community and become involved, as opposed to staying users on the fringe. The fact that two thirds of the attendees of this years Plone conference where newcomers is testimony to the magnetism of our community.

I am not able to express this "difference" in more concrete terms yet, but I hope that it will become clear as Plone.NET grows and becomes solid.

Plone is mentioned briefly in a new working paper titled "The Business of Free Software: Enterprise Incentives, Investment, and Motivation in the Open Source Community" by Dr. Marco Iansiti, Ph.D. and Gregory L. Richards, published by Harvard Business School.

Key conclusion: "[V]endors have not invested uniformly in high impact projects. Rather, it appears that vendors are investing in high impact OSS projects that can to serve in a complementary fashion to draw revenues to their own (largely proprietary) core businesses."

Last week's Plone Conference was truly phenomenal - provocative, intense, and fun (big thanks Jon and ONE/Northwest!).

One of the most amazing things I experienced last week was alluded to in Eben Moglen's keynote (to be posted soon)- the manner in which this community has managed to bring together people who don't ordinarily interact.

Throughout the breakout sessions, I continued to question dividing us up according to our respective vertical sectors - Corporate, Non-Profit, Educational, and Government. As I have begun to write about elsewhere, systems like Plone can help balance the flow of communication and power between people in a variety of situations and settings. Content, collaboration, and community are contexts which exist across sectors, and the tools we all need cross over as well (sometimes with slightly different tunings).

In many ways lumping together all the folks involved with education is odd. Universities are microcosms of cities, and their IT needs are as diverse as the the rest of the world. However, there are still structural and social similarities that form the basis for common language and culture. After engaging with my fellow educators a the educational panel session and the BOF session I understood the value of us sharing and strategizing, beyond just commiseration.

But through it all, there was one thing that united all of the different attendees - a piece of general purpose software called 'Plone'.

It is worth dwelling on this mixture of participants and the varying forces they apply to the software. Lessig and Benkler have both been writing a great deal about hybrid economies lately, trying to understand their rhythms, and how we might be able to design them to succeed. They have been writing generally about the "commercial economy" and the "second economy" (sharing, social production, etc), but the lessons may cross over directly to our community.

I realized in Seattle how beneficial diversity can be for software production.
Most of the consultants using Plone are there strictly for traditional market considerations - to make a profit. They are helping to keep the software honest. Unlike some other open source projects which exclusively service the educational world, Plone is not sheltered from the raw, harsh forces of the commercial market. This means that some of the people using Plone use it because it helps them get their jobs done efficiently. Others have called this "productivity arbitrage", and it is a concept that may hold the key to designing successful open source projects.

It is challenging to imagine working backwards and trying to design a software ecology which captures the hearts and minds of such a diverse following. No small task.

As Rheingold said "There's been an assumption that since communism failed, capitalism is triumphant, therefore humans have stopped evolving new systems for economic production." - Is Plone's ecology an example of one of these new systems, and if so, what are our distinguishing characteristics?

At Plone Conference 2006, Martin Aspeli led a workshop session entitled "Improving Plone's Add-on Products Story."  I think this may ultimately turn out to be one of the most important sessions from the whole conference in terms of its long-term positive impact on the community.

One of the coolest things about Plone is its library of over 400 add-on products.  It's one of the many signs of our community's vibrancy, talent and productivity.  Many add-on products are fantastic, and in fact ultimately get incorporated into the Plone core.  But, this sprawling effevescence of software also presents challenges.   Community-contributed software varies widely in quality.   Some of gets abandoned.  There are multiple tools for some common functions (e.g. blogging).  It's hard to know what to use, what to avoid, and what to jump in with and help.

While I couldn't attend the session (much to my regret), I was really pleased to see that they got out a bunch of notes, and also immediately formed a working group to carry the effort forward.  They're using OpenPlans.org to power a workspace, listserv, etc.

Check it out.  There are lots of ways to get involved for both technical and not-so-technical folks.

I think a lot of good is going to come of this.  I'm looking forward to participating.

    Congrats to gnome team for picking Plone.  Before they start down the road of a implementation -- I would like to put my 2c.  This is only one way to use the Plone CMS.  Many people do not follow this approach, i.e. plone.org.  But I believe if you have limited Plone expertise and you want people to change the public website very easily in the future it might make some sense.

    These suggestions revolve around open/free software that our company built -- the principles are what really matter -- and I dont have 1st hand experience with similiar Plone/Zope tools.  But all software is open and can easily be read/modified/abused to do whatever you want -- hooray FOSS.  This is certainly not the path of least resistance.  But it formalizes the use and expectations of the Plone CMS is a reasonable fashion.

    Seperate the content management and content delivery.  You can do this both logically (staging, skin switching, etc) and physically (cmfdeployment, entransit).  So lets stick with the simplest which is keeping everything inside of the Zope application server and database.

    All of the 'content editing' can happen in Plone with minimal customization, which is good.  The further you get away from 'out of the box' in the way of UI and editing environment.  You are bound to feel pain in the future as Plone UI templates change.  And the reason people pick Plone is the base authoring environment is decent.  We separate it out by having two containers: 'public and 'authoring'.  The 'public' container is where all the content is staged to and the 'authoring' container is where all content edits, workflow, and sophisticated collaboration occurs.

    There is a great tutorial that explains this technique written by Martin Aspelli (UK) titled,  Creating public websites with staging and custom skins NOTE: I can not say Martin would vouch for this approach he only wrote the doc.

    The 'public' user interface (gnome.org) will change much more frequently and can be changed indepedently of the 'authoring' user interface.  The public interface is where the gnome.org skin will be applied and where all the presentation logic can be isolated.  You want the 'public' site to have the least amount of logic and features as possible.  You *do not* want the Plone skin.  You want the 'gnome.org' skin to be displayed for the 'public' website.

    In my experience the website will evolve/change frequently over time while changes and enhancements to the CMS (Plone) will become less frequent. Also isolating your modifications into at least two sets of modules, 'authoring' enhancements and 'website' themes/views/etc.  Since the website software will be touched frequently and often -- use z3 views and have nothing complex in the templates.  Tres Seaver wrote something called 'PushPage' would sounds ideal -- only variables (functions, classes, values) explicitly exposed to the template can be used in presentation.  This guarantee's the templates remain as clean and explicit as possible.

    Also as a side effect you can adjust database/caching parameters better between authoring and public containers.  Oh and hardware: nothing less than 2GB of RAM and dual 3GHz.  Use LDAP.  If you want to use a external search engine it's easier to add it to the public interface -- I recommend Xapian.  Especially if your 'public' container gets notifications that content is being added its a snap to notify xapian or other systems of updates (deletes, edits, etc).

    Hope you guys have a good experience.  (Un)fortunately there are many ways to deploy a Plone CMS.  It really depends on the skill sets and isolating the complexities of the system so that future developers enhancing gnome.org can focus 100% on the 'public' website and minimize exposure to the 'authoring' environment.  Keep in touch.

     I just got off the phone with a potential client.  And we told him our soonest availability and he chuckled.  He said that every Plone consulting firm he spoke with has the same problem!  Wow.  This is fantastic news.  I've heard similiar remarks from Plone consulting firms that I speak with on a daily basis.  In fact its not only that Zope/Plone are doing alright - I believe its clear (to all firms) there is steep upward trend.  Firms are drowning in work!  What a great problem to have!!

     On other news we are about to release our final RC for Enfold Desktop!  You can keep informed by signing up to the desktop mailing list.

     Lastly dont forget to sign up for the Plone Conference in Seattle!  There are FIVE tracks!  Can you believe that?  This conference will be a real challenge to one up in the 2007.

As a relative newbie to the world of Plone & Zope, I found Martijn Faassen's talk "Zope in Perspective" a great introduction to the past, present and future of the Zope community.  It's always great to hear the oral history of our community summed up so eloquently (and humorously!).

Big props to Christian "Mr. Topf" Scholz for videotaping the session.  (More video here.)

Technorati Tags: plone zope

I just received an interesting question about the upcoming Plone Conference 2006 and corresponding sprint, which I wasn't entirely certain how to answer.  In a nutshell, it was whether our very own Mr. Topf would be en route to Seattle with video camera for conference and sprint. 

While we don't yet quite have the registration numbers to do professional quality video (go register to make it happen will ya?), it appears that Mr. Topf is on the participants list, which should hopefully lead to some nice video coverage of the events.

This is also more of a general call for anyone else that is currently or is interested in doing this type of conference and sprint coverage.   Why not build the buzz around what should be a fantastic event? 

I know you, you, and one of you all have produced nice stuff in this genre of work.  So feel free to bring your camera, mics, and editing software to Seattle in October!

There was a fantastic, in-depth story in eWeek today about University of North Carolina School of Medicine's adoption of Plone as their course materials management system, and featuring the work of CIGNEX and Kapil Thangavelu.

Some of the key 'grafs...

Open-source didn't have a starring role at UNC until Plone came along:

"We really never had a large open-source solution before. UNC-Chapel Hill widely uses proprietary software solutions. Education has been slower to adopt open source," Hitlin said. Therefore, open source was not a clear path two years ago when the OIS began evaluating its options, he said.

Plone blew away both commercial and open-source competition:

[UNC] considered both commercial and open-source content management software. The committee evaluated Vignette's Vignette and Oracle's Oracle Portal, which was attractive since the SOM [School of Medicine] already used an Oracle database as its back end....

Plone could be adapted to fit UNC's specific business requirements:

All first- and second-year students attend the same courses at the same time. Each course typically is taught by a number of different professors and clinicians, rather than one instructor. According to Hitlin, if customization was going to be a large part of the project, the CMS committee reasoned, why not go with an open-source version so that, at least, the code would be free? That way, the SOM could devote its limited resources to development and implementation.

Plone's active local user communities were a huge win:

The Chapel Hill area has an active Plone user group, which was an advantage. Since the SOM was in the process of building up its developer staff after a few cutbacks, the committee believed it would not be difficult to find people with Plone skills in the area.

Some problems with highly proprietary hardware cropped up:

[T]he project team got an unpleasant surprise when it installed the application on one of the SOM's Sun Microsystems' Solaris SPARC boxes.

"As soon as we installed the application locally, we saw significant latency—10 seconds to load a page, where it had been 1 second in the development environment. It turned out the SPARC hardware doesn't run Python efficiently," Hitlin said.

Cignex advised the SOM to run the open Plone application on inexpensive Linux boxes, which would run a reasonable $2,000 to $3,000 each. But, according to Hitlin, the SOM's system support group was accustomed to supporting the Sun Solaris architecture and was reluctant to add a new platform to the mix.

But in the end, Plone's usability saved the day:

During June and July of 2005, the team dealt with last-minute bug fixes and user training, which turned out to be trivial, according to Hitlin and Thangavelu. The faculty members intuitively understood the user interface and took charge of updating their course materials with ease.

Kudos to CIGNEX and Kapil for doing high-quality, high-visibility work, and showing that Plone is serious software for solving real-world content management problems.

Technorati Tags: plone unc python

I was lucky enough to get my hands on an olpc developer board, and have spent a little time learning about the platform and project.

While there are a few issues I have with the project, it is really an thrilling moment in educational technology and after holding the hardware in my own hands I actually believe this vision might truly manifest. The main reason I am writing about this in the Plone blog is I have learned that the olpc's application development language of choice is Python!

Sheckitout.

While Plone itself is probably not well suited for the laptop itself -- The Laptop's hardware characteristics are closer to a pda w/ a big screen than a MacBook Pro  (plone-on-a-stick? maybe it could ship on a thumbnail drive), it is easy to imagine communities of practice emerging around this platform. Places where educators and students alike can share tips and tricks, strategies and pitfalls. Who will be their dotmac?

Admittedly, these devices are being built to operate unconnected to the Internet, communicating with each other through ad-hoc mesh networks (presence will be a very low level primitive in this environment, and all applications will have access to it), there may still be a role for a server w/in the network.

I don't know exactly how Plone fits into the larger OLPC strategy, but I get the sense that with all the momentum and capital around this project, if Plone gets there lots of people will see it. And many of them may be the next generation of Python/Plone developers.