SPECIFICS

What: Portland Plone Users Group Meeting:
When: May 9, 2005, 5:00p - 6:30p
Where: TACS Conference Room, 1001 SE Water Ave, Suite 490, Portland, Oregon (directions)

AGENDA

• Introductions, Welcome, and Food
• Why Plone?
• Plinkit: Plone for Public Library Websites in Oregon and Beyond
• Where do we go from here (optional brainstorming for those interested)

RSVP

We're unsure about how many people to expect, so please let us know if you're planning on coming by emailing Darci (darci dot hanning at state dot or dot us) or Jon (jonb at onenw dot org). Can't make it to this first meeting? Want be notified of future Portland area Plone events? Then sign up for our announcement list!

We look forward to seeing you; please, pass this along to others that you think would be interested!

Your Plonista Conspirators,
Jon Baldivieso and Darci Hanning

Our friends at Oxfam GB in Oxford, England are hosting Ploneability, which promises to be a great one-day mini-conference aimed at introducing nonprofits (or NGOs as our European friends like to call them) to the power and beauty of Plone. 

It looks like they have an amazing lineup of sessions and speakers, including:

• Paul Everitt, Executive Director of the Plone Foundation
• A live demonstration of building a site in Plone.
• Running a CMS project
• Migrating a static HTML site to Plone
• Information on Plone hosting

Ploneability will be held on May 25th, at Oxfam GB's offices.   It's free, but capacity is limited to 60, so registration is required.  (Given our experiences with hosting Plone events here in Seattle, I'm sure it will sell out!)

I'm looking forward to hearing a report back from the event -- I think this has tremendous potential as an easy-to-replicate model.  Kudos to Andrew Hatton and crew at Oxfam GB for putting this on, and to all those who are speaking and supporting.

I was very excited to skim through the rich, meaty goodness that is Martin, Hanno and Whit's new Plone Developer Reference.  In one handy document, they cover a wide range of topics of interest relevant to folks who are looking to develop new add-on Product for Plone or to contribute to the Plone core codebase.

It represents a massive updating of the basic how-to documentation for Plone developers and distills much of the wisdom the Plone community has gained over the past few years of very active development and big changes to the codebase.

The new reference outlines the general principles and processes of Plone development and releases -- which have become quite mature now that Plone is stewarded by a rather large team of developers.  There's a nice high-level discussion of the emerging role of Zope 3 technologies in Plone.  Some sensible advice about development best practices.  Insight into migrations and upgrades.  And some very welcome information about building navigation structures and content types. 

Much of the content specifically addresses the new internals of the forthcoming Plone 2.5 release.  It's especially great to have such detailed information available before the release.

 Very, very impressive work, and a solid platform upon which others can build.   Big thanks to Martin, Hanno and Whit.

• 8 ad links, with More Sponsored Links # Why would anyone pay for a second page link?
• On the second More Sponsored Links is a Plone hosting provider and apple.com pimping Plone as "... and other research applications for Mac OS X."
• 5 of the ads are consulting / services firms
• 2 are hosting companies (the most popular hosting companies arent showing up)
• 1 is a commercial CMS that is trying to get serious people to buy their CMS as a alternative to Plone

• FSF, Free Software Foundaiton - http://www.fsf.org/
• CC, Creative Commons - http://creativecommons.org/
• OSDL, Open Source Development Labs - http://www.osdl.org/
• CNX, Connexions Project - http://cnx.org/

Matt Asay offers some perspective on the evolution of leading open-source applications:

Open source applications? We're at the point the ignorance is breeding laughter. SugarCRM, Alfresco, JasperSoft, Plone, Compiere, etc. These are all applications that used to be ignored, but ignorance is no longer serving proprietary competitors well.

As a case in point, InformationWeek just ran a story on Boise Cascade's use of Alfresco for invoice management. Big customer, big need, big value.

Documentum's response? Completely off-base, ill-founded commentary ("Boise's need to cobble together links between Alfresco and MySQL is one reason some parties turn to commercial document management systems") that open source solutions require development, and off-the-shelf proprietary software requires none. Not only is this not true, but it also cleverly hides a ball that every IT buyer already knows: EVERY ERP/CRM/ECM solution requires customization/development.

Let's not try to obscure the issue for IT buyers. Customization is standard. The question is how much a buyer needs to pay for a vendor to deliver the 20-80% of a products features they won't actually use. Open source (well done) offers a granular way to tailor software to an enterprise's needs. Do creative, development-minded enterprises benefit more from open source today than more passive consumers of technology? Probably.

As announced on Plone.org, Aaron VanDerlip is kicking off a Eugene, OR Plone Users Group.  First meeting is this Thursday, April 13th, at 5:30 PM at the Steelhead Brewery.  If you're using Plone in the upper Willamette, or are interested in learning more about Plone, this is a great opportunity to meet, greet and down a pint with fellow Plonistas.

• Geoff Davis' tutorial on Plone caching and performance tuning.
• Ben Saller's demonstration of Bling!, AJAX UI for Plone.
• Alexander Limi's demonstration of how to create a new theme for Plone. (Keep your eyes peeled for his outstanding tutorial, soon to be published on Plone.org!)

I'm not sure why the videos are up in a non-open format (WMV), but I sure am glad they're there. 

I have been thinking alot about tagging lately, especially how a complete tagging system - comprised of user-item-tag triplets, is isomorphic to rdf's subject-predicate-object triplets. It is amusing to think about how egocentric Web 2.0 is - The subject is always me. Web 2.0 might be made of people, but not just any people - Just the most important one in the world.

Today I had a fun time trying to explain to people on irc the power and importance of user contributed content annotations within plone. Crucially, user content annotations are per-user, per-object, and in many cases a single user might want to annotate a particular object with more than one annotation.

Interesting annotations can come in many flavors. There are free form notes, fine grained annotations (anchored to particular phrases - think msword trackback - or geometrical coordinates on the target - nice for image annotations), keyword annotations (aka - tags), etc ect. There many problems that can be solved with custom per user content annotations, including quiz and poll results, per student answer submission, and lately we have been working on allowing users to clip audio and video by annotating start and end times on media objects.

It is important not to confuse per-user tagging with DC:Subject - the dc metadata is shared across all users (like categories in the wikipedia) and in that sense, is global. While we are on the topic of tags, it is useful to talk about the vocabulary that drives the tagging. Vocabularies can be fixed or free, individual or collaborative, and personal or shared. All of these variations are interesting in different cntexts, and have to do with whether or not I see your tags, or if we each are developing our own ontologies.

In educational technology annotations are a big part of the problems we are trying to solve, but there are tons of use cases in the world at large. Additionally, a high performance, robust tagging engine can power personal content organization, like gmail's labels.

Which brings me to the products we have been developing at CCNMTL. We have been using PloneStickies, a general purpose content annotation framework, in production for over a year now. Built using AT References, it allows us to create per-user AT objects connected to the target object. AT Schema Annotations won't do the trick here since, like DC:Subject, these annotations are instance-wide. Z3 annotations might work, but by building AT derived stickies, we pick up search, workflow, permissions, and the richness of AT. This allows us to quickly and easily develop custom stickies, like the StickyClip. 

PloneStickies has a ways to go, but the basics work great. It is not yet super useful out of the box, since the portlet it ships with only allows users to attach a single free form StickyNote to the target object. But it is great to develop applications with. It ships with with some super snazzy css stickies, complete with colored/resizable/title-barred/drop-shadowed/roll-upable/transparent-when-dragging notes, which can preserve their own x-y position and state across sessions and never fall off your screen. It now supports attaching multiple stickies to a target, but does not yet provide a mechanism for the target object to place the stickies itself.

At first we thought we could implement a Plone tagging solution using this framework - just create a StickyTags made out of keyword fields, and voilà - plonr. Trouble was, since tagging is such a symmetrical model, its tough to build an efficient zodb implementation (for me, at least) that can handle all the querrying we wanted to do.

Enter the tasty microapp and the PloneTasty proxy (about 90% done). Tasty is a stateful (sqlobject) turbogears component that exposes a REST api, ships with its own snazzy ajax tagging client, and can be used across frameworks, languages, and platforms. We are even hoping it can help make the world a better place.

So StickyTags (which doesn't exist) and PloneTasty are two implementations of the same concept, with StickyTags being the AT/zodb implementation and PloneTasty/tasty the new microapp design (mashup architecture?) we have been working on and are pretty psyched about.

And if you act now, you get the knife set and the lint remover too, for just 3 easy installments.

Martin Aspeli wrote to the plone-users, developers and documentation lists this morning with a "loud cross-post" in which he outlines a number of critical gaps in Plone documentation, and asks for our help in filing them:

Plone's documentation has grown tremendously over the past two years or so since Plone 2.0. We recently had a documentation sprint to try to organise and improve what's there, and there's a lot of ground that's been covered.  Maintaining and quality-assuring all of it is a challenge, and we need more help in this area.

However, there are a few gaping holes as well. Sometimes we have documentation that's incomplete or of questionable quality. Sometimes we have no documentation at all. We'd like to change that, with the following call for help.

Martin asks that we take a look at:
http://plone.org/development/teams/documentation/missing-documentation

where he lists a half-dozen of the most critical documentation needs, outlines very clearly the work that needs to be done, and suggests the best ways to get started.

Martin emphasizes that you don't need to be a Plone guru to write good documentation --  merely willing to step up and learn as you go.