Likewise, great topic ideas are starting to emerge and the following look likely:

• Continuing to improve the Plone membership/user management story (i.e. PAS, membrane, remember, teamspace, etc.)
• Mapping in Plone (i.e. PrimaGIS)
  

In the meantime, I'm hoping to ask the following of those interested:

• Keep this in mind as you start looking for flights, we'll get this confirmed as soon as possible so you can move forward.
• Consider whether you would like to help coordinate the sprint.  Already needing to prepare for the conference, I can guarantee that Jon and/or myself won't be able to contribute much to this.  We're hoping to setup a few details that would be tough for an out-of-towner (like location and maybe food), but after that we're hoping those interested in sprinting can take the lead on recruitement, topics, etc. 
• Be thinking of topics that might be good for new sprinters, we're hoping to attract a lot to the conference.  And involving those that stick around is a must.
  

If Andrew Burkhalter weren't getting married, I'd be spending the weekend of August 4-6 at the Vancouver Python Conference, drinking beer with Andy McKay in knowledge from Python luminaries such as Guido van Rossum of Google, Jim Hugunin from Microsoft and Ian Cavén of Lowry Digital Images.

Andy and friends have put together a great 2+ days of talks covering a wide range of Python and Zope/Plone topics suitable for everyone from beginners to experts.  And it's a steal at $100 ($50 for students, speakers and the unemployed).  But hurry, because rates rise to $150/$75 on July 1.

You can register online, and it even looks like they may still have a few slots for late breaking talks.

Thanks to a recent development push by Alec Mitchell and myself, we've now got mailing lists available to users of the openplans.org community organization website.  I'm very excited that we've got this out the door; as Zack Rosen from CivicSpace has said, if you provide wikis and mailing lists you've pretty much covered about 85% of the organizational needs anywhere.

Our mailing lists are based on Alec's listen product.  Listen is great because, in addition to regular mailing list behaviour, users can browse and participate in the list conversation via a web interface.  It's a bit raw, yet (more on that below), but it's quite a solid foundation.  And I'm finding listen's simplicity quite nice in contrast to the byzantine interface of that other popular python-based mailing list software.

There's still plenty of work to be done, however.  The interface, for instance, isn't nearly as nice or as usable as we'd like.  And, while we don't want to add every bell-and-whistle in the world, there are still a number of core features that aren't in place.  List member management, in particular, is still underdeveloped.  We don't yet allow list owners to manage the list membership (because we're still working on the subscription confirmation code; can't have spammers creating lists and arbitrarily subscribing thousands of users on our hosted service, can we?).  We also don't yet support moderated list subscriptions; anyone is free to subscribe to any list.  These features are on the short list, though, and should be showing up within the next couple of weeks.

If you're interested in using an OpenPlans hosted mailing list for any reason, please feel free to drop by our site and give it a whirl.  First, you need an account.  Then you need to create a project, when the project is created you'll be asked if you'd like mailing list support.  Once the project exists, click on the 'mailing lists' link and then on 'Add mailing list' and you're off.  (If you already have a project on openplans.org, just visit your project preferences to turn on the mailing list support.)

Also, of course, all of the OpenPlans work is open source and available for use by anybody; we'd love to get more people using and contributing to our codebase.  Instructions on getting set up locally are available, please let us know if you have any problems with getting set up.

Cheers, and happy mailing!

My colleague Andrew was checking out Wufoo.com today. It's a slick AJAX-powered tool for building online forms.  Hmm.... I can think of lots of parts of Plone that involve building forms (PloneFormMailer, ATSchemaEditor).    It might be very interesting to checkout Wufoo for ideas about how to build highly usable UI for managing forms with AJAX-enabled Plone 3.0.

ONE/Northwest, in collaboration with the Seattle and Portland Plone communities, is proud to be your host organization this year, and we're excited to welcome you all to our beautiful city on the shores of Puget Sound.

We are still in the process of putting together all of the details, and will be publishing a lot more information here soon.  We are committed to making this the most open, transparent, community-organized Plone Conference ever, and we're going to need lots of help from you to do it!

What you can expect

• Three full days of talks, tutorials and workshops for Plone developers, folks implementing Plone in their organizations and people who are new to the Plone community.  We will feature both technical and non-technical talks covering the past, present and future of Plone and its vibrant community.

• A beautiful venue in a large park in the heart of Seattle, steps from lodging, food and entertainment.

• Reliable wireless access. ;-)
• Registration will open in early July.  Early bird registration for all three days will be $250.  After August 25th, registration will be $300.
• There will likely be one or more 1-2 day training events before the Plone Conference, and a 2-day Sprint after the conference.  Details TBA.

• The draft agenda and a call for presentations
• Interesting information from our pre-planning Plone Conference Survey
• Registration information
• Sponsorship information
• Exciting surprises yet to be revealed!

• Mark your calendar. 
• Think about talks you'd like to give -- or attend! 
• Get excited!
  

Questions? 

Jon Stahl, ONE/Northwest Program Manager, will be your cruise director for Plone Conference 2006.

Email: jon <at> onenw.org  Skype: jonstahl  IRC: jonstahl  Phone: +1 206.286.1235x15

Andrew Burkhalter, ONE/Northwest Plone Developer, will be leading the Program Team for Plone Conference 2006.

Email: andrewb <at> onenw.org  Skype: andrewburkhalter  IRC: andrewburkhalter  Phone: +1 206.286.1235x20

Plone 2.5 was released yesterday.  This is the first "infrastructure" release under Plone's new release plan and version numbering scheme, which includes alternating "infrastructure" and "feature" releases.

Most of the new stuff in Plone 2.5 is underneath the surface, where the first big chunks of Zope3 plubmbing are now in place -- most notably the PlonePAS user authentication framework, which makes it easy to have Plone authenticate and store member properties in external data sources and the new GenericSetup system for creating and configuring sites.

There's also a slew of minor bugfixes and usability enhancements.

Congratulations and thanks to all those who worked so hard to get this out the door.  Onwards to Plone 3.0!

I'm very excited by ArcheCSV. It's a simple, powerful, easy-to-use tool for doing bulk uploads of content into Plone from a CSV (comma-separated-value) text file.  I think this is going to be insanely useful for anyone who is trying to import a big pile of old content into a new Plone site.

1. Install the ArcheCSV file, which requires Plone 2.1.2 or 2.1.3.  (It hasn't yet been tested with the forthcoming Plone 2.5, but I'd guess it's likely to work there too, or require only minor modifications.)
2. Use the Add menu to add an "Importer" object inside the folder into which you want to import your content.
3. Walk through the simple wizard to:
• Choose a content type for your imported content.  (The dropdown could stand a little clean up to remove the Zope jargon.  For example, if you want to create ordinary Pages, you have to choose "ATContentTypes.ATDocument.Document" which could be a bit intimidating for new site admins.)
  
• Upload your CSV file or paste it into the provided text box.
• Map the fields in your CSV file to the fields of the Plone content type.  The UI for doing this is very clean and straightforward.
• Run the bulk import. Voila!

ArcheCSV also has a handy feature that allows you to optionally "update" objects that already exist.  I think it matches on the objects' IDs.  This could be very useful for syncing data in Plone with data exported from another system. 

All in all, this looks like a smooth, simple, useful tool.  I could imagine it being really useful in a TON of situations, including, but certainly not limited to:

• Importing blog entries into Plone
• Importing content from RDBMS-based CMS systems into Plone

One suggestion: "ArcheCSV" is a pretty geeky name that doesn't clearly describe what this useful product does.   Why not call it something more immediately descriptive like "CSV Content Importer" or "Plone Content Importer"?  I think that could make it easier for beginning and intermediate Plone site administrators to find and use it.

Big thanks to the folks at 1000asa.com and to Richard Amerman of 7TechNW for getting this out into the world.

Paul Everitt, Executive Director of the Plone Foundation and Founder of ZEA Partners (that's him in the middle betweeen Martin Aspeli and Duncan Booth!), offers a fantastic writeup of Ploneability, Oxfam GB's recent one-day "Plone for NGOs" event. 

I had a 45-min slot for discussing "The Plone Community: What It Is and How It Works". (You can view the slides but they probably won't be much use.) My talk focused on the mechanics of the Plone community, not the features of the software. The NGO decision-makers need such information to evaluate open source products, and hopefully, join forces with a community that shares its values. Fortunately I had some key people from Plone-land in the audience to help explain: Andrew, Martin Aspeli, and Duncan Booth.

Even more interesting is Paul's description of Romilly Gregory's talk, which covered how Oxfam wound up chosing Plone as their CMS platform.

[Oxfam's] Romilly [Gregory] gave the talk of the day. She explained the motivation that led to the [Oxfam CMS] project and the way they approached the RFP and tender process. She then gave an insider's view of how the selection process worked, including a series of graphs showing the actual results of their grading criteria on various vendors and software packages. Romilly explained how open source was added to the list a bit late in the process and how it challenged the traditional ways to do a vendor selection. Romilly also described the features of "Enterprise Plone", the package that resulted from the Oxfam project. (Note: The Oxfam project can take some or all of the credit for CMFEditions, Kupu, LinguaPlone, CompositePack, and more.)

This was a remarkable session. Very rarely do you get the honest scoop on the crucial details. The audience, I think, realized that they were getting wildly, wildly valuable information, and engaged in a serious discussion. The back-and-forth was a joy to see: the NGO decision-makers were deeply interested, asking spot-on questions, adding follow-ups to each others' questions, and getting straight answers from Oxfam. The session closed with a tremendous buzz and energy.

Great writeup, Paul.  Thanks for sharing.  My only regret is that I couldn't be there.

We make some pretty good wine up here in Washington State.  But none so fine as this, which my colleague Sam Knox recently bought for me. 

That's "Cabernet Sauvignon - Merlot - Syrah" in case you're wondering. ;-)

Although they didn't manage to quite time to sync up with the Ubuntu Dapper Drake release ;-), it's very exciting to report the release of Plone 2.1.3, which bundles up four months of bug fixes, usability enhancements and performance tweaks.

The full list of fixes is pretty long (249 items!), but among the highlights noted by release manager Stefan Holek are:

• You can now insert resized images into pages.  This is a hugely useful feature, and I believe it may be unique to Plone, thanks to the extremely tight integration between Plone and its graphical editor Kupu.
  
• Portlets now have support for rounded corner styling, which makes Plone even easier to customize.
• Viewing an uploaded file now downloads it directly
  
• Various improvements to the navigation portlet

It's great to see Plone kick another quality release out the door.  Plone 2.5 is just around the corner!