Drag-and-drop portlets are coming to low-end blogging products like Wordpress.   Users will be expecting this of higher end tools like Plone Real Soon.  I think this shows that Plone Solutions is on the right track with the PlonePortlets UI ideas.  (We just implemented PlonePortlets from SVN for a major project and the clients are thrilled with how easily they can control their site's portlets!)

Kathy Sierra, creator of the "Head First" series of tech books, is working on her next book, to be titled "Creating Passionate Users."  She's got a great blog of the same name.

She's looking for user stories.  Thought there might be a few folks reading who are passionate about a software tool and its community. ;-)

In the next couple of weeks I'm going to make a few requests for people who have a story to tell about something they're passionate about, and also to ask if you can point me to products/services you think fit the criteria I'm looking for. It's for the "Creating Passionate Users" book (from O'Reilly) that I'm now so behind on I'm surprised the publisher isn't holding my horse hostage. [And a big thanks to my review team that's come back online]

Remember, the definition of "passionate" we're using means that you are always learning, growing, improving in some way related to the tool/product/service OR (more likely) something that the tool lets you do. (For example, you're passionate about your Canon camera because it lets you take great photographs, and you're always trying to get better with your photos--tweaking the manual settings, etc.)

What I'm looking for today is:

1) Anyone who is truly passionate about their Wacom tablet.
Whether you're passionate about the device itself (programming the buttons just so, learning how to push the limits, maybe lusting after (or owning) the Cinteq, etc.) OR (again, more likely) passionate about the kinds of work you're able to do with your tablet that you know you couldn't do otherwise.

2) Anyone who is passionate about any tech product--hardware or software--that is not a game. I'm especially interested in things more associated with productivity or any kind of business work. For example, an Excel user who is constantly pushing to use the tool to do more interesting things with modeling, etc.

3) Anyone who is passionate about a particular non-profit cause or service. Again, I'm looking for things where you are actively involved and always trying to learn and/or do more related to it. Simply being a very strong believer/supporter is not enough... it must be something for which you are continuously learning more and potentially getting more involved.
(p.s. this could include a church, although I'm NOT looking for stories about passion for a religion, but rather a passion for a specific church/organization that you are involved with.)

4) Anyone with a pointer or story to tell about a company (anything other than a game or sport) that provides a great deal of learning support for its users at all levels, whether its through good tutorials, active online support forums, etc.

I'd love to hear from you, and it is entirely up to you if you want your real name in the book--anonymous is just fine, although if you've got a story of your own to tell, I will ask if I can quote you.

Thanks so much guys. Oh yeah, I know that a lot of YOU have products and services and causes that people are passionate about, so don't be shy about self-promoting that to me! If you think it meets the criteria I've listed, please let me know (although I'll ask for a reference to an actual passionate user I can talk to).

Speechcasting, ability to dynamically generated podcast's of latest updates on a website using text-to-speech technology.  I am naive about how visually impaired persons work with the internet.  Several years ago I watched a blind person use Plone at a Snow Sprint -- it was one of the most moving events in my life.  The fact that Plone, which has been accessibility minded for years was usable with brail keyboard and the user could create new content types and work with the user interface was awe-inspiring.

So its been a few years but I recently saw someone make a new Speech Synthesis product for the Plone CMS.  And then I started thinking, "What if every time I added a News Item on my website, if I could automatically generate a decent text-to-speech .mp3 file and use podcasting to keep people up-to-date?" After hacking on it I asked someone "Is this a good idea?" and they said "If I can read it why would I care to listen to computer generated voice?" and that confirmed it -- people arent thinking about the visually impaired.

After a hour Sidnei and I cooked up a very simple product that uses Five, the zope 3 library bridge software that allows developers to use libraries from zope 3 in the zope 2 application server.  This sounds scarier than it is.  After all zope 3, five, zope 2 -- its all just python libraries.  Anyway -- what we did was interesting  because we wrote the extensibility "plugins" around how the speech will be generated.  The idea is that over time better speech text could be generated. 

I have always liked Speech Synthesis, back on DOS when I used to play with phoentic programs -- I always loved it.  But now there is a sensible idea -- lets generate audio versions of latest news for websites.  And with the text-to-speech engine, Mary you can do all sorts of interesting ways of inflection and intonation on the generated voice. 

So why did I do this?

• See if Speechcasting is a interesting idea for others around the internet.  Especially the visually impaired.  I am very interested in hearing feedback from people who could use this idea in everyday life.  That is the most important audience.
• Show other developers how easy Five/Zope3 is to use for the Plone CMS.  Very simple.  No need to have actions code, or install/uninstall scripts and all the boilerplate code that comes with CMF/Plone.
• Actually do a tad bit of programming.  Even though the code is HORRIBLE for Speechcast - its checked into the Collective, I needed to program something fun for a change.  Sidnei thought the idea was cool so I did it.  And it was enjoyable -- Python is the funnest language and zope3/five brings lots of fun with it!

I would love to hear what your think about Speechcast (of course not the code quality) but the merit of the idea.  IF you know anyone who is familiar with accessibility technology - please pass the word on.  After all in the Plone community we are very mindful and want to help out those that may be overlooked by commercial software.  When this whole AJAX/Web2.0 stuff reaches it peak -- how many people will be left not being able to use computers because of the lack of accesibility?  I hope Plone continues its long tradition of keeping in mind those who inspired us at the Snow Sprint a few years ago -- the impaired who gain so much by us keeping them in our thoughts.

Seth Gottlieb and friends at Optaros have followed up their well-received white paper on open-source web content management systems with another run-down of open-source document management systems.  Both papers presented quite favorable reviews of Plone.  And, if memory serves, Plone was the only product Optaros reviewed in both papers.

Optaros' point of view is decidely large-enterprise-centric, but they present a solid overview of the product landscape, and smart analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the tools.

Plone's strengths were:

• Usability
• The "large and prolific" Plone community ;-)
  
• Strong workflow
• Accessibility for disabled users
• Documentation
• Many ways to access documents (WebDAV, FTP, Windows Explorer integration, External Editor)
  

Weaknesses:

• Lack of strong, built-in versioning (although CMFEditions was noted as a strong emerging add-on product)
• The relatively opaque nature of the ZODB
  

Tagging seems to have spurred a growing amount of research on categories and classification.

A recent paper by Clay Shirky, entitled Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags directly challenges the desktop metaphor which currently underlies much of Plone's UI. To be sure, it is certainly possible to model the connections that Shirky describes using topics, smart folders, and a disciplined use of keywords, but the metaphor is critical for designing and intuitive system, all the way down to the icon.

I have recently been working a bit with Drupal, and their handling of this problem is worth checking out.  The core taxonomy module, combined with its corresponding menuing systems (menu, sitemenu, taxonomy menu) provide a great deal of flexibility in this regard.

Organization is going organic.

My good friend (and one of the smarter developers I know) Carl Coryell-Martin came back from the ETech conference this year very charged up about Kathy Sierra, who among other things writes a blog called Creating Passionate Users.  She's an ex-Sun employee who has written a best-selling series of technical books that apply the neurobiological principles that help us become passionate, masterful users of technology. 

Her blog is well worth reading for anyone who's thinking about how to nurture and grow the Plone community.

I'm very pleased to see that the crew at Quintagroup have just released PloneComments, a new product which offers  some long-overdue enhancements to the Plone commenting process, including:

• Notification to site admin of submitted comments
  
• Notification to author of approved comments
  
• Comment moderation
  
• Name field for anonymous comments
  
• List of recent comments for easier bulk moderation
• Plone control panel configlet (!) which includes
  
  • Turning on/off moderation
  • Turning on/off manager notification
  • Turning on/off editor notification
  • Turning on/off anonymous commenting
  • Configure admin email for notifications
  • Configure notification subject

It's even compatible with Plone 2.0.5 (and of course the Plone 2.1.x series).  This is great news for folks using commenting in Plone.  I'm looking forward to implementing it here on ThePloneBlog.

I hope that the framework team will seriously consider reviewing the code and if it passes muster, rolling it into Plone 3.0.  It's long past time for Plone to have these kinds of features built in.

Big thanks to Quintagroup (and any of their clients who might have sponsored the work) for making such a big contribution to the commenting experience in Plone.

Update: No sooner had I published this than I noticed that DailyKos, the planet's largest political blog, has just released a massive AJAX-powered overhaul of its extremely active comment threads. It's very impressive, and well worth mining for future UI inspiration.

Here are some of the quick notes I jotted down during Alexander Limi's talk on skinning Plone at the New Orleans Plone Symposium.   Much of what he demonstrated was familiar to me, but it was great to see the maestro first hand, and I picked up a few subtle tricks that made a lot of sense.

• Only show content type icons for logged in users.
• Do this by using CSS registry to put a condition on generated.css
• Skin by turning off most CSS except columns and authoring & building back up again. This is often easier than overriding Plone's styles.
• It's OK to edit main template to re-order elements. Just keep track of your changes.
• Plone's current global_logo template is "insane" and will get simplified in Plone 3.0.  It's OK to turn it into an image and a link.
• Use a:link to avoid styling anchors.
• Use percentages for font sizes.  Computed off of 16pixels * 69% = 11px.  Multiply up from there.
• Use bottom-border instead of underline on links.

A brief technical note: I've had to temporarily disable comments on The Plone Blog because we seem to be suffering from a Plone 2.1.1 bug.  There's a patch available, and it's fixed in Plone 2.1.2 but applying it will require me to move this site to a new instance, and might take a few days.  My apologies.  We're return to "fully interactive mode" soon.

Plone co-founders Alexander Limi and Alan Runyan took the podium on beautiful sunny morning here in New Orleans in front of a hotel ballroom is full of still-slightly groggy Plonistas.   Here are my rough notes.  All errors are most certainly mine.

Alexander Limi

"The Plone middle class" -- people who are using Plone as a tool, not doing it full time.   We have a lot of "normal people" in our user base.  That makes us different.

We're not the best at everything across the board.  We're good at some things, worse at others (which we're working on.)  The community is, as always, our greatest asset.

Zope lists in 2000: participants were somewhat anonymous.  "Either an idiot or a genius, and no way to know which."  Plone has added people in the middle.  Brings diversity of experience. 

"We're kind of a 'J2EE Liberation Front' -- people realize they can start a business around Plone."  That's how Plone Solutions started, and that's how it should be.

We're one of the few community-driven open-source CMS products -- most others are spawned out of corporations. 

50+ translations (35 are 80% complete)
300+ products
    Big innovations in techniques for making and distributing products

Alan Runyan

Need to make it really easy to discover and install third-party products.

Six techical books on Plone, and now, a non-technical end-user handbook.

Three Plone Conferences, Two Plone Symposia.

Alexander Limi

So, what is Plone?

We had no idea when we were first starting to build it.

Now, we know that it's about producing and managing content.  

Going to focus a lot on the process of creating content.  Longer term focus on multimedia content.

"Rorschach effect" -- people see what they want in Plone.  It crystalizes client's needs into a concrete form.

ArchGenXML -- GUI-based generation of content types.

"It's very important that normal people can do stuff with Plone out of the box."

Alan Runyan

Plone helps solve the "chicken and the egg" problem -- where developers say "tell me what you want and we'll build it" and users only know that they don't want what the developers built last time.

Frameworks don't make money -- applications make money.  Plone makes money.

People can define their needs in terms of Plone -- a press release is a news item plus a contact.

The Future of Plone:

Lots of confusion about the future path of Plone, due to mixed marketing messages from Zope.

Zope 3 can be understood as an R&D exercise to generate technologies that can be consumed by the "real-world" Zope 2 community.  Zope 2.9 will be a product of that process.  It will have "fantatsic" Zope 3  technologies for re-using code.   Plone 3.0 will run on Zope 2.

Plone 2.5 release will be about infrastructure.  Getting our ducks in a row for a 3.0 release by removing many Zope2-isms.  Plone 3.0 will be a major UI release.

Plone started out as a UI, then it grew frameworks, now it's trying to push those frameworks back down the stack.  (Goldegg was an example of this.)

Alexander Limi

Plone 2.5 will have interesting new technologies that offer an alternative way of working.  But the old Zope2 ways will still work.   Zope3 technologies will allow for stronger separation of application logic and templates.

Plone 3.0 will be the most important Plone release thus far.  First big Plone 3.0 kickoff will be the Archipelago Sprint in April.   Trying to bring every key developer (and as many other people as possible). 

Big focuses will be adding AJAX UI elements.  AJAX + Archetypes will allow us to produce dynamic and effective UIs that are still accessible.  e.g. Click-to-edit elements.

Getting the developer community to the Archipelago Sprint is very important.   Sponsoring travel costs for the Sprint is one of the most valuable ways for non-developers to contribute right now.

"I'm trying to grow the UI team.  Talk to me if you're interested."

Questions

Migrations:  will be much, much easier from here out, because we're not ripping out the content types like we did in Plone 2.0 -> 2.1.  2.5 will be less painful.  (The biggest change will be the membership setup.)

Document versioning:  (Alex) "We need to bless a solution."  Which will most likely be CMFEditions, which will eventually make it into the core, maybe for Plone 3.0.  Short term: Plone's "history" feature will get back into Plone 2.5 now that a couple of blocking bugs have been fixed.

(Alan) We would prefer to push staging issues out into the consulting space.  i.e. solve at the presentation layer, not in versioning system.

ZODB & SQL: (Limi)  "We need a more compelling RDBMS story" -- lots of R&D coming from Django and Turbogears communities.

What UI problems are you interested in?  (Limi) - in-place editing without page reload & save.  Faster content production.   Make it easier to move and rearrange content.

How to better handle big files out of the box? (Alan)  ZODB is landing some features for this.  This will be the simplest way, worth waiting for.  External files needs more energy.


Closing thought from Alan:  Last year I asked my big-CMS consulting friend, "How do Documentum & Vignette handle migrations."  The answer: "That's 60% of my business."  Plone is trying to provide this for free.

You'd be surprised at how little feedback we get.  Please give us more.  Things only get fixed when you complain. ;-)

At Enfold Systems, we put our code in our public svn.  Then it sort of sits there.  This happens to lots of Open Source consulting firms.  Its easy to put it in your own SVN repository because you want full control.  Does it really matter that others are using your code?  Its your itch that is being scratched.  Who cares if people dont visit your repository and see your code?  You, the developer - is who should care.

The reason you should care about getting your code into a collective repository is simple, it lowers the bar for cross pollination with other projects and organizations.  See, it takes quite a bit of effort to release software.  You need to write the LICENSE file, README, tests, a webpage that describes its functionality.  Its quite a formal ceremony.  And not exciting if all you did is scratch a itech and want others to discover your software.  This is where the collective's momentum kicks in -- as people start working in the collective; monitoring the collective's check-in mailing list -- you might notice a component that is being worked on that is interesting.  Then you can potentially scratch your itch with someone else's work.  The most slackinest thing that can happen -- reuse of work. 

Anyway - I hope that the code that we contributed and the other 1000 check-ins per month are useful outside the person who is working on the code.  After all - that is what this whole open source thing is -- isnt it?

ATCSVImport

Plone UI for importing CSV files into Archetype based content types.  Very
simple but used on many of our projects.  Have a CSV file where each row
needs to be a content object in Plone?  This is the product for you.

MultiPathIndex

PathIndex was suppose to handle this use case.  The ability to have multiple 
path's indexed in the catalog and being able to query by them.  We used this
on Oxfam America to have content appear in multiple regions.  Then we could
query for all content in a Region and all content in its subregions would show up.
Ultimately this should roll into ExtendedPathIndex.  Very useful.

CaseStudy

A content type that we wrote for plone.net.  Plone.net has been a very interesting
exercise of community/business relationships.  soon we should see a result -- which
is fantastic!  This was a content type that would serve as a "Case Study".

ZipCodeTool

This is a great example of something that should not be a tool.  It should be refactored
into a python library so anyone can use it.  Basically given a zipcode you can ask for
zipcodes in N mile radius.  Used on some of our customer websites.  They love the functionality.

DeprecationWorkflow

This workflow is similar to the standard Plone workflow, with some
minor modifications to account for deprecation (and subsequent review)
of outdated documents.  A Real World workflow.

ContentPortlet

No idea what this is.  I believe its a simple mechanism to edit a portlet
as if it were content.  Probably pretty self explanatory once you install it.

FSReST

For use with any CMF based system, such as Plone.  FSReST is a 
FSObject that supports displaying filesystem based Restructured-Text 
documents.  Makes it effortless to display restructured-text in your website.

ExtendedHistory

This module makes a simple modification, it changes the history that is shown
on a document to include the history from OFS.History.Historical, showing you 
all the edits and changes to a piece of content.
   
Unfortunately the details shown in that changes are still as obscure as the
transaction notes in the history log and don't tell you anything useful.

Well thats it for this weekend.  Not sure if I left anything else out.  There will be quite a few more commits coming as we sort out our repositories.  But I have been looking at some of the amazing stuff in the collective.  Very cool stuff in there.  Lots of rubish but some good stuff.  Other things I suggest you look at:

Teamspace, CMFEditions, LinguaPlone

I'm trying to get our staging system sorted out and pushed into the collective as well.  We currently make releases of it at http://plone.org/products/ensimplestaging .This product needs to be renamed and refactored into z3 adapters.  Its fairly generic and could be immensely useful for lots of other projects.  It basically keeps track of changesets of objects in a folder. 

Dont forget - Plone Symposium in New Orleans.  I hope I will see you there.

Alan Runyan

Wow, great Plone advocacy multimedia piece are popping up like dandelions this week.  First Sean Kelly's bravura technical screencast, now Tom Parish's more business-focused interview with Scott Kelley about how Disney is using Plone to empower average employees to publish content for their internal knowledge systems.  It would make for great listening on a plane ride to, say, New Orleans. 

Key points [any errors or overbroad generalizations are mine]

• Thousands of business units at Disney need to communicate with and publish for each other.
  
• Their homebrewed fat-client publishing tool is built for experts, and takes a full day of training to use. It also can't gracefully scale to large numbers of users.
  
• Over 2005, Disney reorganized itself into a handful of large divisions. The newly-created Media division revolted against the status quo with the enteprise portal.
• Disney didn't want to go through the process of procuring a commercial "enterprise" CMS tool. 
  
• They decided to do it simple, fast and cheap with Plone. 
  
• Key advantages for Plone: easy to install, easy to use, good support, relatively inexpensive.
• Some pushback against the relatively lightweight nature of Plone (compared to their internal tool).
  
• Positioned Plone as a complement to existing tools, not a replacement.
  
• Some concern about the "unfamiliar technology stack" -- i.e., Plone's not Java. 
• Availability of great support and consulting is absolutely critical. Even Disney doesn't want to have to "be the experts" -- they want to contract out for support and expertise.
• Disney worked with Enfold Systems -- based on their track record of integrating Plone with LDAP and other large systems. 
  
• Disney's experience with support for Plone and JBoss has blown away Vignette's support.
• About 200 people publishing now.
  
• Being able to "just publish" with Plone is a "huge cultural shift."
  
• Turns out they're using it for blogging (with Quills!) -- which they never expected.
• The future of Plone at Disney: improving blogging (!), publishing via WebDAV, identifying suitable third-party products, more structured content types, integration with an existing external taxonomy tool. 
  
• Other divisions within Disney are starting to come a-knocking. 
  

Also: Plone vs. Sharepoint and what each is good for, some interesting discussion about blogging in Plone.

Nice work, Tom & Scott!

Christian Theune and Thomas Lotze of Gocept announced a new book on the Plone-users email list today.  Content Management with Plone will be a handbook for everyday end-users of Plone.

It's going to cover content types, editing content, workflow, members and groups -- pretty much everything you'd need to be productive with Plone on a daily basis.  Speaking as an integrator, it will be really helpful to have a textbook available for our small nonprofit clients.  I can't wait to check it out at Plone Symposium.

It's also cool to think that the Plone community is large and healthy enough to support an ongoing stream of commercial books like this.

Content Management with Plone is available for pre-order now, shipping (free!) on April 1.  That's no joke.  Cost is 25 euro, and it's available in English and German.

(It would be really cool to offer a discounted PDF license to nonprofit/charitable users of Plone!)

On a related note, why is http://plone.org/about/books blank?

Part of the open-source process is fixing bugs together.  For folks who are new to a tool, the most daunting part can be getting started.  That's why it's cool to see Hanno Schlicting and the plone-dev team putting together a "newbie-friendly" bug day this weekend, which is intended to help new would-be bug-fixers get up and running.

Here's the info on how to get started.

They've even identified some especially newbie-friendly bugs for folks to cut their teeth on.

That's really cool.  I wish I wasn't trying madly to finish my talk for Plone Symposium.

(Update: Hanno's not the release manager.   He's the unofficial "Plone janitor" [his words, not mine].  My bad. Don't believe anything you read on a blog. ;-)  Regardless, he's doing great work.)

Okay, this is a long one, but it rivals any comparison matrix:

better-web-app

Plone comes out shining, although arguably it compares apples to pomellas.  Someone with the chops should really cut this baby up into chapters, cause its  a win for dynamic  languages over j2ee, and python, and Plone to boot. (spoiler: he uses the zmi for "hello world" and ArchGenXML for the time tracking app).

I could also connect this presentation to ideas in Johnny Can't Program (cited in a recent interview with Behlendorf) and "where have all the zmi developers" gone, but  I'll save that for another post.