Ok... so it's not the kind of hot man-on-man action you were (maybe) hoping for.  But you have to admit, SmartPortlets is just a damn good idea:

SmartPortlets lets you define portlets based on Smart Folders (Topics) using a control panel configlet.

Yes.  With Plone 2.1, Smart Folders (formerly known as Topics) took a huge leap forward because made them easy to create and manage.  That is really cool.

But there is so much more we can do to make it easy for non-technical site administrators to quickly build powerful query-driven pages, portlets and more.  SmartPortlets points squarely in the right direction.  As Sean points out, sooner or later, PlonePortlets (or its successor) will probably obsolete this specific tool, but tools like this that push the power of Plone into end-user space are exactly the kinds of things we need more of.

Another great example of this is RichTopic, from David "Siebo" Siedband, which simply slaps an HTML body on top of a normal Smart Folder view.  But that simple combination gives you the ability to create incredibly powerful pages that combine static content with a dynamic listing of content, all without writing code or leaving the beautiful Plone UI.

The OpenID folks are offering a $5000 bounty to qualified open-source projects that implement OpenID.  Plone is on their "most wanted" list.

http://iwantmyopenid.org/bounty

To answer the obvious question: "OpenID is a light-weight, decentralized authentication mechanism that allows you to have one login that you can use anywhere on the Internet. "

Demand for Plone consulting must be booming, as two of the larger US-based Plone consulting shops, Enfold Systems and CIGNEX, both posted job announcements this week.

• Enfold job announcement
  
• CIGNEX job announcement

Joel Burton, aka "Mr. Plone Bootcamp" has recently announced a few new late/summer early fall training classes.  Here are the coordinates. 

CONTENT MANAGEMENT WORKSHOP

Is your organization using Plone, and you want to learn to use it? Or are you evaluating Plone, and want to learn exactly what it can do? This course teaches how to add, edit, and manage content in Plone, and demonstrates how easy and flexible this can be. This friendly, 2-day course, aimed at non-developers, does not require any knowledge of HTML or Plone.

2 days, Sep 14-15, San Francisco, $350
http://plonebootcamps.com/courses/sf-cm

PLONE BOOTCAMP NYC

Plone Bootcamps comes for the first time to New York with our week-long, hands-on developer bootcamp. We'll cover how to use, customize, and develop for Plone sites, and welcome anyone experienced with HTML--no Python or Plone experience is required. We'll give you the skills you need to build your site or develop your consulting skills in Plone.

5 days, Sep 18-22, Manhattan, NYC, $450
http://plonebootcamps.com/courses/nyc

** Sign up soon as the bootcamps fill up quickly **

PLONE ADVANCED BOOTCAMP

Want to learn the professional techniques and advanced concepts of developing for Plone? This hands-on, advanced class covers the concepts that follow our popular Developer Bootcamp, and build on the skills learned in this course.

3 days, Sep 11-13, San Francisco, $550
http://plonebootcamps.com/courses/sf-adv

==

Long-time Plone developer Richard Amerman of 7TechNW.com, based in Vancouver, WA (just across the river from Portland, OR), is now leading Plone training classes.  He's launching his first two classes in August.  Here are the details:

Plone System Administration

Dates: 15 August 2006 - 17 August 2006

A Plone training specifically designed for system administrators. Learn the basics of Plone and Zope while focusing on system support and administration tasks needed to keep this system running smoothly.

http://www.7technw.com/training/t-padmin01-f

Build by Design: Rapid Product Dev for Plone using ArchGenXML

Dates: 29 August 2006 - 31 August 2006

Many of you have been interested in ArchGenXML for some time. You may have seen a demo of it first hand at some event, read something about it online, or seen one of a few pod-casts that show off this amazing technology as the demonstrator cranks out a new Plone product almost faster than you can follow. This technology is not actually magical, does allow a developer to quickly visualize an idea and move it into a working product very quickly. This tool is the product of the hard work and dedication of many key developers in the Plone community. Every user has a different perspective on how it fits into their tool-set, and how deep down the rabbit hole they tend to plunge, but all will agree that it is a key feather in the Plone development community's hat.

We will be spending most of three days delving into all aspects of this tool. Every student will leave with both first hand knowledge of the capabilities of this tool, and personal experience in its use. We will also explore other related tools including the future replacement of ArchGenXML, Genesis.

We will start with a foundation that will allow you to best capitalize on the benefits ArchGenXML has to offer, starting with a quick reminder of what it means to be a product in Plone, then an overview of Archetypes, and then into an introduction to UML. This foundation will give us a solid base from which to build our understanding of ArchGenXML.

CMSWatch offers up a short article entitled "Portal Kudos and Shortcomings - Summer 2006" in which they assess 12 major enterprise products (including 3 open-source products: Plone, Liferay and JBoss) against 6 typical scenarios:

• Web Publishing
• Self-service
• Collaboration
• Enterprise Intranet
• E-business
• Enterprise Integration

CMSWatch finds Plone to be a "potential fit" for Web Publishing and Collaboration, and a "likely misfit" for an E-business portal focused on linking vendors and suppliers.  It's a pretty balanced, but ultimately somewhat shallow review that places Plone amongst some pretty elite company including Oracle, SAP, SharePoint.

Random note: Janus also thinks that Limi's accepting a job at Google is a loss for Plone.  Ummm, ok.

http://www.packtpub.com/award

“The Packt Open Source Content Management System Award is designed to encourage, support, recognize and reward an Open Source Content Management System (CMS) that has been selected by a panel of judges and visitors to www.PacktPub.com.”

The almost-always wise Kathy Sierra makes a powerful argument for Ignoring the Competition and checking out of the Features Arms Race.

It's The Feature Arms Race that leads to the bloody kicking and clawing and fighting for market share. The Feature Arms Race is a form of group think, and we all know that design-by-committee does not produce art. We must wean ourselves off the obsession with the competition. If we're constantly trying to one-up them--or even just stay up with them--how does this really serve the users? How does it help the users kick ass if we're so focused making sure our feature lists kick ass? But it's hard to do.

[We] fear... that we'll be sitting in a sales meeting with a big, prospective client and they'll ask "Do you do X?" and, instead of talking to them about X and why it might be valuable to them and how what their real issues are, we want to be able to say "Sure, of course we do X."

Environmentalist, business consultant and generalist extraordinaire Dave Pollard offers up an interesting comparision between "Hierarchical Corporation's Offerings" and "Natural Enterprise's Offerings."

It's interesting on many levels, but I was struck by how much it resembles the value proposition of open source generally, and Plone specifically.

Plone Conference 2006 is a community-driven conference, and one of the most important roles that you play is putting together the agenda.

July fourth has come and gone, but the fireworks set off at last week's sprint are still visible.

The sprinters arrived at Columbia University bright and early, Wednesday morning. (note to all future sprint organizers: tell the caterers to skip the decaf and double the regular order). About ~13-15 sprinters were present, but we also coordinated remote sprints with Austria (+5 hours ahead) and Utah (-2 hours behind) meaning we were basically sprinting around the clock. We all used the freely available, plone-based, OpenPlans service to manage our collaboration and everyone found the software to be extremely reliable and easy to use.

The sprint began with introductions and detailed demos of the tools and products people had been working on and were most proud of. Sprints are difficult to plan in advance since the skills and interests of the attendees are not decided until the final roster shows up. A diverse range of interests were represented, but common themes rapidly emerged - most of us were working at or with non-profits, building community sites with educational goals, and we all had a very strong interest in participatory media (in contradistinction to mass broadcast media). It became apparent that although we were all working on different problems, very similiar features and tools could be part of our solutions.

The sprinters self-organized into 3 teams (+ 1 remote team):

Multimedia - focusing on improving the handling of multimedia content w/in Plone. Topics included transparent management of multiple media formats, improving the quicktime player, abstracting the common controls from the different media player formats, merging Austria's ATVideo bittorrent branch, allowing for remote resources to be managed by the media types, and the integration of CCNMTL's video clipping tool into PloneMultimedia. Thanks to Nate, Gary, Anna, Kurt, and Sky for making this group a productive success.

Discussions emerged around the hybridization of modern media formats. Is an audio track with synchronized gifs a piece of audio or video media? Modern events are now distributed in multiple media formats (e.g. podcasts and vodcasts) - might PloneMultimedia benefit from a UI analogous to PloneLingua? What about metadata embedded directly in the binary file? Should it be editable ttw? Which file is the canonical file and which are the derivatives? Whatsoever will we all do about large file support?!?

A new 'media' container was introduced to PloneMultimedia allow for the mgmt of media that spans multiple traditional formats.

Annotations/Tagging - laying out the jigsaw puzzle that tagging, rdf, taxonomies, folksonomies, and sticky notes, and microapps have become in the hopes of consolidating on a common strategy to move forward. The Yucca project was born after we all began to realize how many of our problems would naturally fall into place with a robust engine which supports user contributed content annotations.

Also, work was done by Anders and Chad on the sticky notes product with the aim of factoring out the notes so they could be used outside of plone too (with the persistence abstracted, so that it could be backed by a microapp - like pita, or even stored client side), as well as improving the editability of the notes - they now support "double-click to edit".  Great job!

Blogging/Syndication - This group (Rob and Kurt) was primarily working on polishing quills so that it provides a smooth user experience. Progress continues and Quills is looking like a serious contender.

Content Licensing - see Nate's post on conetent licensing in plone. This work was conducted primiarly by the group working in Utah, out of C()SL.

In case its not obvious, there was a great deal of overlap between the interests of the groups. For example, the multimedia team was also very interested in tagging, syndication ((p/v)odcasts), and licensing. Although it initially seemed challenging to tease the participants apart, the groups self organized quite organically.

Some time early in the sprint, Rob treated us all to an impromptu tutorial on z3 annotations and continued to support the various groups in their attemps to absorb the new world order. By the end of the day, 3 seperate pairs of developers had the contentratings product installed and running, demonstrating how important it is for there to be good examples representing best practices in the collective - these practices spread virally. Whit actually spent a chunk of time with Christof and Darian thinking about a good packaging system for keeping the z2 and z3 layers as thin as possible. They also spent time backporting the tagger product from zope 2.10 to  2.9.

Throughout the sprint curious academics wandered through in an attempt to catch the rare glimpse of a geek working in the wild.

Ian Bicking also stopped by to check in with his new coworkers.

Since 3 days of sprinting is never enough, sprinting actually continued over the weekend at the openplans offices with a reduced number of hardcore plonistas. Christoff was gracious enough to invite us into his home for a home cooked meal.

If anyone has anything else to add to this report, please do - sorry I missed it.

The sprint was very productive, educational, and great fun as well. Beyond the technical achievements, relationships were forged that we expect to flourish in the months to come. I think we all witnessed tremendous convergence across our organizational requirements, and are also convinced that the tools we are working on will be in great demand once the corporate world figures out how useful these technologies can be.

Throughout the sprint participants shared tips and tricks, demonstrating how important live, in-person communication remains, even in the Google Age. This was especially apparent when the nyc sprinters attempted to convey proceedings to the remote sprinters and we felt the limitations of geographic displacement.

Sky got married on Sunday in a park on the Hudson river. His last days as a bachelor were devoted to this Sprint, and we all wish him and his new wife a happy and healthy (Plone-free) honeymoon.

Pictures

"bigapplesprint" on flickr.com

And, since Anders is so special, here is his set:

Special thanks to our hosts, Columbia's Center for New Media Teaching and Learning for sponsoring the sprint and making us all feel at home in New York City.

Registration is now open for Plone Conference 2006, to be held October 25, 26 & 27 in Seattle, Washington, USA.

Register online: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/5403

Early bird pricing ($250) is available through August 25th.  After August 25th, regular pricing is $300.

More information about Plone Conference 2006

Plone Conference 2006 main event information

Plone/Zope/Python screencasting superstar Sean Kelly has produced a fantastic 10-minute "Introducing Plone" screencast.  It, well, introduces Plone for site administrators and users, and shows off Plone's amazing ease of use, powerful searching features, powerful content types, and editing your member profile.

Can't wait to see this on plone.org! :-)

A couple months back, we did a quick survey of the Plone community in order to put together a compelling and relevant bid for hosting Plone Conference 2006.  Here is the first chunk of summarized results.

So far as I know, this was the first time anyone has attempted to do any sort of broad-spectrum survey of the Plone community. 

We asked two open ended questions, then summarized the results by theme.

1) What are the three most important things you'd want to get out of the 2006 Plone Conference?

What I think was most interesting here was the fact that relationships were mentioned twice as often as anything else.   This tells me that we need to make sure the conference does a good job of getting people introduced to each other, and maximizes each person's opportunity to talk with as many other folks as possible.

2) Any other advice, wisdom, rants or raves to share with us as we ponder Plone Conference 2006? 

Quite a few folks from not-North-America expressed disappointment at the idea of a Plone Conference in the US.  To be expected I suppose.  Hopefully there will be a European bid next year! 

We also heard loud and clear the importance of getting the word out early (which hopefully we're alreay doing!),  and of making sure the content, structure and marketing of the conference are attractive to folks who are new to Plone.

I think that both of these questions also serve as an interesting window into the collective mind of the Plone community in mid 2006.

What story do these results tell you?

Back in March, Peter Krantz put a number of WYSIWYG HTML editors (both open-source and commercial) through their paces and published an evaluation.

None of the open-source tools did all that well, and Kupu scored dead last.  :-(

I'm not 100% confident in his testing methodology, or that it accurately represents Kupu as used in Plone or CPS. (He conducted his tests using the official demo version, and thus ignores the effect of the cleanup routines present in an actual install of Kupu.)  But it's an interesting data point.

The comments are also interesting.  Folks with more Kupu-fu than I may want to offer Peter their observations and/or corrections.