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. ;-)