I haven’t posted much here lately, but I have been writing. I recently finished my first semester as a doctoral student in Columbia's school of journalism and one of the papers I completed draws directly on my experiences in the Plone Community.  A few years ago I remember being struck at how different open source development was from what I (and presumably others) imagined it to be. I kept pitching human interest stories to journalists, ones that might emphasize the playfulness, the sprinting, and the organizational experimentation, but got very few nibbles. So, I finally wrote some of this up myself before it all fades from memory:

The paper was for a wonderful class this semester at the New School taught by Paolo Carpignano (The Political Economy of Media - here is the syllabus). The class was all about the shifting relations between fabrication and communication, or more colloquially, work and play. We opened with Marx and Hannah Arendt and closed with Yochai Benkler and danah boyd. The piece I wrote is personal and anecdotal, but reflects on all that our community has taught me about free software, free culture, organizing, consensus building and the day to day politics of software development.

enjoy.

Finally the software has been released. Last year there was a Ploneability High Education event held in November at the University of Houston. I promised a few things during that presentation. We have followed through and I want to explain to the wider community our motivations.

At the Ploneability event I said Desktop 4 would be free. Desktop is now available to download. I also want to highlight some features: decoupled Desktop from Plone, the UI is now mostly asynchronous, fixed tons of bugs. We now feel that Desktop 4 should be widely distributed and urge everyone to use it.

Specific highlights:

• Enfold Desktop no longer requires Plone. The Desktop Server components for CMF/Plone add "more functionality" to the user's experience. Such as workflow control and property sheets. But the server components are no longer required. In this mode Desktop users simply have fewer options. They have a very nice and reliable DAV client that is more predictable than Microsoft Web Folders. You can now use Enfold Desktop with Plone, Zope, CMF, mod_dav, IIS, etc. In fact we urge you to use it on any DAV server!
• Performance. The UI was originally synchronous. This meant you could do one thing at a time. If an operation took a long time (say uploading a 100MB file) your Enfold Desktop would become unresponsive. This is no longer the case. You can upload and download multiple files at once and edit files -- all simultaneously! The user experience is significantly better because of these performance enhancements. Give it a shot and tell us.
• Bug squishing. Not much else I can say. We added a Report a bug feature. Also if desktop does something unexpected it will prompt the user to send us a message (it also sends internal logging). This has helped tremendously. We have uncovered loads of bugs and fixed them. Often bugs that end users were unaware of but were still happening under the covers.

Why we released:

Enfold Systems is very interested in acting as a good community citizen. We believe that Enfold Desktop will enable people to win more consulting projects. If they want support and to remove the ads - they can pay us. But the result is the consulting community is often asked for Windows Desktop integration and there was no de-facto standard. Enfold Desktop aims to be that standard. By having the broadest adoption of Enfold Desktop there will be a coherent Plone / Windows Desktop integration story.

This is only the beginning. We have laid one piece of the foundation. Plone has a complete DAV integration (server and client). But it needs much more. Specifically we need software developers to make their software DAV compliant. This requires the entire community to buy-in. There are many reasons for DAV compliance. One example could be import/export.

An example is having a representation of content outside of the CMS, say in the case of exporting. Also a way to create content by importing this representation. So the import/export story, I believe, could be tied to having a DAV representation for content. Plone still does not have a full import/export story that is 100% textual and independent of the storage medium. Customers want repeatable import/export.

Another could be creating a cross platform editor for content. We now have Enfold Desktop and External Editor. But we can not edit "rich content types". This could be very interesting. Double click on content and have it open up in a rich editor that supported calendar controls. We have a higher level of abstraction other than "File". It would be a pity for everything to be file oriented.

If you do not keep up with IT analysts writings. Plone is the big kid on the block when it comes to Open Source content management. Desktop integration is one facet to CMS. The plone community now has a great foundation to make a much richer experience. And an immediately useful Folder/File-level DAV integration for the Windows Desktop. But it will require more from the community. Specifically users asking product writers to support DAV. Because it is the product aftermarket that makes the Plone CMS so powerful. Commercial CMS's do not have such a flourishing aftermarket. The Plone aftermarket is continually building and sharing 24 hours 7 days per week.

Lastly I would like to clarify Enfold System's position when it comes to open source and Plone. Enfold Systems is the Windows open source content management system specialist. We focus on providing product, services, and integration to organizations that want the power of the open source Plone content management system while reusing their existing Windows infrastructure. This is very important for large organizations. This is our niche. Our customer's want a vibrant community. So as we provide service to a wide variety of organizations from small-medium size non-profits to fortune 100 companies - Enfold Systems is trying to build a sustainable open source model. A part of this manifests in big releases like Enfold Desktop 4 being released. But more often than not you can see aftermarket Plone components such as the magnificent UploadReferenceWidget and the visionary Entransit Content Deployment all the way to unseen bug fixes to Python COM bindings, Zope, and Plone. PLIP 187 is an example of us feeding changes from product development back into Plone proper. Enfold Systems sees releasing Desktop as a way to grow the Plone ecosystem. Also to maintain visibility that Enfold Systems is both the premier Open Source Windows CMS provider and the Plone experts.

This is a fun post recognizing the role of open source software and breaking routines in learning new programming patterns and paradigms.

7 Reasons I switched back to PHP after 2 years on Rails

Rails was an amazing teacher. I loved it’s “do exactly as I say” paint-by-numbers framework that taught me some great guidelines. I love Ruby for making me really understand OOP. God, Ruby is so beautiful. I love you, Ruby. But the main reason that any programmer learning any new language thinks the new language is SO much better than the old one is because he’s a better programmer now!

This story articulated an idea that I have been thinking about for a while - the ways in which developers working on open source software enter into an educational relationship with the software and the community (sometimes indirectly, mediated through the code).

I have often appreciated all that Plone has taught me about the domain of content management, component architectures, extensible software design, internationalization, test driven development, responsible release management, etc etc. I know that it has taught me well since when I walk up to new pieces of complex software like Sakai or Drupal the concepts are familiar and often isomorphic. I can vouch that exposure to Plone has helped designers I know with stretch their CSS skills, improve the accessibility of their sites, and more cleanly separate presentation from logic.

I have also made the case that for an organization to work on software in isolation is bit like having a conversation with yourself. At first you might arrive at some new insights, but its really hard to learn anything new in a hermetically-sealed vacuum chamber. The software world transforms so quickly that it is a Sisyphean task for any one person or organization to track. Joining a community, even if it is through the indirect, intermediary object of code, is a great way to continue learning and stay on top of emerging trends. The notion that learning happens through dialog is an old one; the notion that working with open source software is a form a dialog with the authors is a bit less obvious.

My main critique of Derek's post is that he doesn't explicitly acknowledge the fact that Rails is open source, which is precisely what enabled him to learn so much from the framework. This isn't just a matter of attribution, it has practical implications for being able to continue learning new tricks over time.  If he had realized that Rails-the-software embodied the knowledge of the Rails-the-community, he might not have been so quick to venture off and write his very own framework. I am not arguing that he should have steered clear of php, but he does not explain why he decided to roll his own framework as opposed to joining forces with Cake or another existing php framework, or at least using an existing php templating system. With a more explicit understanding of the origins of the knowledge that Rails-the-software captures, he may have appreciated the potential future gains of remaining part of some community.

While it is possible to learn something from proprietary frameworks, "learning" is fundamentally about the open exchange of knowledge and meaning, which are values intrinsic to F/OSS. While you can learn something from a .NET api, you can't step through the entire stack of software in the debugger. Perhaps more importantly, the cultural tendencies on an open project support constructionist poking and prodding (dare I say, hacking?).

From Xavier Heymans of ZeaPartners comes word of an interesting opportunity for the Plone community to advocate for Open Source in European e-government, and to promote the PloneGov initiative. 

The PloneGov initiative is in the running for an EU "2007 eGovernment Award" for "most innovative good practice."  You can vote for Plone.  Xavier writes:

Winning this award will highlight the maturity achieved by the Open Source collaborative model as a pragmatic way to tackle IT challenges in society. You may register to vote until Friday, September 7th, and can vote until September 20th.

PloneGov's project description: http://www.epractice.eu/cases/plonegov

Patrick Shaw, who leads NPower Seattle's Plone consulting practice, shares a few things they like about Plone:

• You can edit your content from a modern web browser. It’s almost as simple as that - visit your site, login, click the edit button, and change your text!
• You can quickly and easily create a news or event or “spotlight” posting that populates the home page (or any other page, matter of fact!) of your website, and then stops publishing when the event is over.
• You can create as many pages as you want.
• Your sitemap is always up to date
• The search tool searches both your site and the innards of your Word and PDF documents
• You can have “member only” sections of the website for board members or staff or for other stakeholders
• We can implement a Plone website (where you get more of a website, a LOT more) for the same effort level as websites that were challenging for you to edit.
• Yes, you can integrate your Plone website with Salesforce!

"Collaboration via the net does not necessarily require monolithic, expensive tool suites that aim to do everything under one umbrella. We will share and demonstrate the use of readily available, mostly free, discrete sets of "small" and "loosely joined" technologies - weblogs, wikis, instant messaging, audio/video chat. The loose joining means that how they are connected are not necessarily in the programming of the software, but the ways people can use them in a social context that is an environment of dynamic, changing relationships and connections, rather than the rigid, limited ones defined by computer code."

EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES Tag Clouds in the Blogosphere: Electronic Literacy and Social Networking

So what does this mean for the other sectors where Plone operates? I have been hanging out in Drupal land lately, and for a variety of reasons I don't consider that platform to be a serious threat to Plone, in the long term (more on that in another post).

On the other hand, and this might raise some eyebrows, folks maybe should take a peek at Gallery 2.2 . Yeah, its in php, and they don't have enough unit tests, but it does a really nice job of solving the "bucket" problem - that is, easily publishing a repository of digital assets on the web. Their next version will handle audio and video files, and the software is popular enough that people have built desktop clients for iPhoto and Picassa. They have a good story for multi-site installations, upgrades, and even a web based mechanism for upgrading plugins. Just imagine mashing up this backend store with a social-networking tool like elgg. Maybe you could create complex and elaborate views of your data with widgets coming out of the simile project (exhibit and timeline, in particular). You might even be able to use a visual programming tool, like Yahoo's pipes or IBM's QEDWiki to assemble this application.

The real threat here isn't Gallery. Its the loosely-joined, disconnected applications that are becoming connected through the component architecture of HTTP itself (plus a few decent patterns and standards). No one wants to be trapped in a silo, not even if its decked out with hardwood floors, leather furniture, and a marble mantle.

Plone can be a major provider in this hub of communications, maybe even sometimes at the center. But we do need to try to anticipate the future role of the CMS in the face of asymmetric competition.

As Laura Trippi once put it, Content Management Systems like Plone, are turning content produces into coders, and vice versa. We're creating monsters, and they might soon be outgrowing the tools they were weaned on.

(thanks to Biella for the video reference and the critical commentary).

On the off chance that you don't grace the Plone list for NGOs or missed the training opportunity on plone.org and weren't able to join, Joel Burton of PloneBootcamps.com and myself were asked to help N-TEN represent Plone in it's "Ask the Expert" session.  The transcript for the 1 hour session is now available.  Check it out if you're interested.

So, how did it go?

Personally, it was an honor and I rather enjoyed taking part in the session, despite feeling a bit hesitant about the "expert" labelling.   A few additional thoughts and reactions to the session follow:

• Joel Burton, of course, was his usual brilliant self at explaining complicated concepts in the somewhat challenging IRC format. 
  
• Making the previous point even more impressive ... my only complaint was continually feeling frustrated with the difficulties of articulating answers over the same format.  N-TEN was using a web-based IRC client called Gabbly, which doesn't support tab completion of screen nicks.  It's incredible how big a difference that makes to perceived typing speed :)
  
• There were significantly fewer blanket "compare Plone to Drupal and Joomla" questions than I anticipated.  Those questions are fine, but without specific feature requirements and use-cases, it's quite difficult to accurately represent where Plone definitely excels from a content editor perspective (besides the fantastic usability, that is!).  Hint: it excels at everything ;^)
• It was a lot more of pointing people in the right direction to self-serve, rather than specifically answering their questions.  The scope is obviously vast.  We made a solid pitch to get people to the already incredible and existing resources that the Plone community offers including the lists and the #plone IRC channel.
• Hosting.  I knew it would come up and it's one of the more challenging ones to answer as it comes down to very fundamental differences to the architecture of Plone versus some other systems with which people may already be familiar.  It's great that we can point folks to Webfaction, High Speed Rails, Six Feet Up, as well as NPower -- all of which credible serve the nonprofit sector.   Additionally, it's great that your typical nonprofit can understand that the potential benefits of the Plone stack are worth the additional $10-20 USD/month, that sometimes commodity LAMP hosting has its drawbacks, and want to invest in their web presence.  Despite all of this, I still think there's an incredible opportunity for all the would-be Plone hosting providers to come into this space and greatly contribute to the story of the platform for the one off site.  
  
• In talking with N-TEN's director of programs, I was told it was quite well received by attendees and compared favorably with the other sessions on Drupal & Joomla.

Paul Everitt asked me to do some storytelling about Plone.NET and I agreed to do this because I need some practice - I'm becoming a dad in 4 months time. Hopefully the story is as colourful, scary and hopeful as most fairy tales, and as real.

In short the best introduction to the blog posts that I will attempt in the time to come, is from Paul's request to me:

"Initiatives like plone.net take some work to make them feel solid. As the insiders work, they need to know more about the big picture and also need to get some positive reinforcement, that their work is valued. Then, as things get closer to reality, the outsiders need to know what it is, why they should care, how it is evolving, etc. They need to see energy for plone.net to feel real. In short, we need to do some storytelling."

At the Plone conference in Seattle two weeks ago, there was strong agreement that we need to market Plone better, or as Alan Runyan put it "pour gasoline on the fire". So even though all Plone consultants and companies are already inundated with work, we want more!

Are we greedy? No. We really love Zope and Plone and what it is becoming and we want this to grow. We don't necessarily know how to do this but we definitely have a few bright people and tons of dedication amongst us that should keep us going. And hopefully we remain humble enough to ask those who know.

As a first initiative to introduce more of Plone to the world, we need to populate Plone.NET. So create an account and contribute what you can. This is the place where you can brag about what you are doing with Plone for the benefit of Plone, yourself and your own organisation. And if it is not working as expected please report it so that we can get it fixed.

I'm not going to assume that everyone will automatically contribute to Plone.NET. I can imagine a few obstacles that might prevent you from publishing case studies and sites to Plone.NET. The most common one will probably be that you don't have enough time, which is understandable since you already doing so much Plone work. Solution: MAKE time. Please :-)

You might be reluctant to contribute to Plone.NET because your competitors are listed there. Hey, there is something wrong with your thinking here. The goal of Plone.NET is to grow the market so that it can sustain all of us. More Plone companies alone will not help grow the market - we need to showcase our collaboration on Plone.NET.

I have a feeling that we have a very unique organisation of businesses around Plone. Many Plone companies are betting there whole business on Zope and Plone and are actively contributing to it's growth. This is very different to companies using more established technologies while being very far from the center of the development and the developer community. When people start using Plone they are drawn closer to the community and become involved, as opposed to staying users on the fringe. The fact that two thirds of the attendees of this years Plone conference where newcomers is testimony to the magnetism of our community.

I am not able to express this "difference" in more concrete terms yet, but I hope that it will become clear as Plone.NET grows and becomes solid.

    Congrats to gnome team for picking Plone.  Before they start down the road of a implementation -- I would like to put my 2c.  This is only one way to use the Plone CMS.  Many people do not follow this approach, i.e. plone.org.  But I believe if you have limited Plone expertise and you want people to change the public website very easily in the future it might make some sense.

    These suggestions revolve around open/free software that our company built -- the principles are what really matter -- and I dont have 1st hand experience with similiar Plone/Zope tools.  But all software is open and can easily be read/modified/abused to do whatever you want -- hooray FOSS.  This is certainly not the path of least resistance.  But it formalizes the use and expectations of the Plone CMS is a reasonable fashion.

    Seperate the content management and content delivery.  You can do this both logically (staging, skin switching, etc) and physically (cmfdeployment, entransit).  So lets stick with the simplest which is keeping everything inside of the Zope application server and database.

    All of the 'content editing' can happen in Plone with minimal customization, which is good.  The further you get away from 'out of the box' in the way of UI and editing environment.  You are bound to feel pain in the future as Plone UI templates change.  And the reason people pick Plone is the base authoring environment is decent.  We separate it out by having two containers: 'public and 'authoring'.  The 'public' container is where all the content is staged to and the 'authoring' container is where all content edits, workflow, and sophisticated collaboration occurs.

    There is a great tutorial that explains this technique written by Martin Aspelli (UK) titled,  Creating public websites with staging and custom skins NOTE: I can not say Martin would vouch for this approach he only wrote the doc.

    The 'public' user interface (gnome.org) will change much more frequently and can be changed indepedently of the 'authoring' user interface.  The public interface is where the gnome.org skin will be applied and where all the presentation logic can be isolated.  You want the 'public' site to have the least amount of logic and features as possible.  You *do not* want the Plone skin.  You want the 'gnome.org' skin to be displayed for the 'public' website.

    In my experience the website will evolve/change frequently over time while changes and enhancements to the CMS (Plone) will become less frequent. Also isolating your modifications into at least two sets of modules, 'authoring' enhancements and 'website' themes/views/etc.  Since the website software will be touched frequently and often -- use z3 views and have nothing complex in the templates.  Tres Seaver wrote something called 'PushPage' would sounds ideal -- only variables (functions, classes, values) explicitly exposed to the template can be used in presentation.  This guarantee's the templates remain as clean and explicit as possible.

    Also as a side effect you can adjust database/caching parameters better between authoring and public containers.  Oh and hardware: nothing less than 2GB of RAM and dual 3GHz.  Use LDAP.  If you want to use a external search engine it's easier to add it to the public interface -- I recommend Xapian.  Especially if your 'public' container gets notifications that content is being added its a snap to notify xapian or other systems of updates (deletes, edits, etc).

    Hope you guys have a good experience.  (Un)fortunately there are many ways to deploy a Plone CMS.  It really depends on the skill sets and isolating the complexities of the system so that future developers enhancing gnome.org can focus 100% on the 'public' website and minimize exposure to the 'authoring' environment.  Keep in touch.

     I just got off the phone with a potential client.  And we told him our soonest availability and he chuckled.  He said that every Plone consulting firm he spoke with has the same problem!  Wow.  This is fantastic news.  I've heard similiar remarks from Plone consulting firms that I speak with on a daily basis.  In fact its not only that Zope/Plone are doing alright - I believe its clear (to all firms) there is steep upward trend.  Firms are drowning in work!  What a great problem to have!!

     On other news we are about to release our final RC for Enfold Desktop!  You can keep informed by signing up to the desktop mailing list.

     Lastly dont forget to sign up for the Plone Conference in Seattle!  There are FIVE tracks!  Can you believe that?  This conference will be a real challenge to one up in the 2007.

I just received an interesting question about the upcoming Plone Conference 2006 and corresponding sprint, which I wasn't entirely certain how to answer.  In a nutshell, it was whether our very own Mr. Topf would be en route to Seattle with video camera for conference and sprint. 

While we don't yet quite have the registration numbers to do professional quality video (go register to make it happen will ya?), it appears that Mr. Topf is on the participants list, which should hopefully lead to some nice video coverage of the events.

This is also more of a general call for anyone else that is currently or is interested in doing this type of conference and sprint coverage.   Why not build the buzz around what should be a fantastic event? 

I know you, you, and one of you all have produced nice stuff in this genre of work.  So feel free to bring your camera, mics, and editing software to Seattle in October!

There was a fantastic, in-depth story in eWeek today about University of North Carolina School of Medicine's adoption of Plone as their course materials management system, and featuring the work of CIGNEX and Kapil Thangavelu.

Some of the key 'grafs...

Open-source didn't have a starring role at UNC until Plone came along:

"We really never had a large open-source solution before. UNC-Chapel Hill widely uses proprietary software solutions. Education has been slower to adopt open source," Hitlin said. Therefore, open source was not a clear path two years ago when the OIS began evaluating its options, he said.

Plone blew away both commercial and open-source competition:

[UNC] considered both commercial and open-source content management software. The committee evaluated Vignette's Vignette and Oracle's Oracle Portal, which was attractive since the SOM [School of Medicine] already used an Oracle database as its back end....

Plone could be adapted to fit UNC's specific business requirements:

All first- and second-year students attend the same courses at the same time. Each course typically is taught by a number of different professors and clinicians, rather than one instructor. According to Hitlin, if customization was going to be a large part of the project, the CMS committee reasoned, why not go with an open-source version so that, at least, the code would be free? That way, the SOM could devote its limited resources to development and implementation.

Plone's active local user communities were a huge win:

The Chapel Hill area has an active Plone user group, which was an advantage. Since the SOM was in the process of building up its developer staff after a few cutbacks, the committee believed it would not be difficult to find people with Plone skills in the area.

Some problems with highly proprietary hardware cropped up:

[T]he project team got an unpleasant surprise when it installed the application on one of the SOM's Sun Microsystems' Solaris SPARC boxes.

"As soon as we installed the application locally, we saw significant latency—10 seconds to load a page, where it had been 1 second in the development environment. It turned out the SPARC hardware doesn't run Python efficiently," Hitlin said.

Cignex advised the SOM to run the open Plone application on inexpensive Linux boxes, which would run a reasonable $2,000 to $3,000 each. But, according to Hitlin, the SOM's system support group was accustomed to supporting the Sun Solaris architecture and was reluctant to add a new platform to the mix.

But in the end, Plone's usability saved the day:

During June and July of 2005, the team dealt with last-minute bug fixes and user training, which turned out to be trivial, according to Hitlin and Thangavelu. The faculty members intuitively understood the user interface and took charge of updating their course materials with ease.

Kudos to CIGNEX and Kapil for doing high-quality, high-visibility work, and showing that Plone is serious software for solving real-world content management problems.

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