We had 23 participants from all over the country, including two European sprinters from Berlin and Finland.

One of the sprinters was Rocky Burt, the lead developer of the Plone4Artists products. Hailing from Canada, Rocky conducted two days of Zope 3 training right before the sprint.

If you missed the course in Boston, you're in luck! This unique class Zope 3 Training for Plone Developers will also be offered again right before the Plone Conference in Naples.

There were also 8 remote sprinters from far away places such as Japan, Australia, Italy and Switzerland, who tuned into the live video stream and collaborated via the #plone4artists IRC chat channel. See the full list of participants and photos from the event.

The focus of the sprint was to improve the multimedia capabilities of Plone, and in particular to fix bugs and prepare the Plone4Artists suite of products for a new release.

I'm happy to report that thanks to the hard work of the sprinters, we successfully made new releases of many Plone4Artists products: Plone4ArtistsAudio, Plone4ArtistsVideo, Plone4ArtistsSite, Plone4ArtistsCalendar, etc.

Sprint reports

There were several teams dedicated to working on various topics including the Plone4Artists products as well as syndication, licensing, RESTful interfaces and iPlone, an iPhone optimized theme for Plone.

• Audio
  
• Video
  
• Calendar
  
• Uploading
• Large files
  
• Syndication
  
• Licensing
  
• RESTful interfaces
  
• iPlone

In the press

There was a journalist from IDG who attended the sprint, and published two articles about the event which appeared in several IDG publications.

LinuxWorld and InfoWorld magazine articles about the Plone4Artists sprint:

"Sprinting to create open-source content management"

"You're never alone with Plone"

Screencasts

Jonathan Lewis made an excellent screencast introduction to the Plone4ArtistsAudio product Thanks Jonathan! We still need screencasts for the calendar and video products if you'd like to help out.

Online Demo

If you want to try out the Plone4Artists products but don't have time to install them yourself, you can demo them on the http://plone4artists.com site. Please report any bugs you find to the trackers!

Want to help?

There are many ways to get involved in the project, even if you are not a developer. We need you to download the products and test them out, reporting any bugs that you find to the issue trackers.

Join the mailing list and ask questions in the #plone4artists IRC channel. We can always use help in writing documentation and making screencasts - short videos which demonstrate the software's functionality.

Lightning talks

There were a number of very interesting lightning talks given at the sprint. These have been video recorded and will be made available in the near future. Subscribe to the Plone4Artists mailing list to be notified when they are published.

Sponsors

Many thanks to our sponsors without whom this sprint would not have been possible: Christian Science Monitor, The Nature Conservancy, Oxfam America, Friends of the Earth International, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, New England Wildflower Society, Abstract Edge and Jazkarta. ShinyWhiteBox.com also donated two licenses for its excellent iShowU software for making screencasts.

If your organization is using the Plone4Artists products, please consider sponsoring the Plone4Artists project. Your financial contribution makes it possible to continue developing the products and having sprints to grow the community.

The Future

We are planning to continue the work at the post-conference sprint in Naples. There will be a multimedia track and we hope to get 1.0 final versions of all the products out at that time.

We are also working on some new products (Plone4ArtistsPodcast, ContentTagging, Plone4ArtistsRevverVideo, Plone4ArtistsImage, Plone4ArtistsTheme), which you can read about on the Plone4Artists products release announcement.

And we are working on a buildout to make it easier to install and setup a Plone4Artists site.

Thanks again to all of the sprinters who came to Boston and made the sprint a success!

-Nate

The Regional Free Software Conference takes place August 7-11 in Cordoba, Argentina.http://jornadas.grulic.org.ar/7/ The conference themes are Business, Society, and Technology. Plone had a strong showing, and has 12 sessions! Everything from Plone 3, PloneGov, to Plone performance and product development.  Check out the full program of Plone, Zope, and Python sessions.

Other interesting-sounding talks include the "Django vs Zope 3 deathmatch", an appearance from Grok, and programming for One Laptop Per Child.

Congrats to the Plone Conosur (or Plonosur, as I like to call them :) community for showing such a strong presence of Plone and Zope in the region! I know several of the people involved in organizing the event (and used to live in Cordoba) and really look forward to participating at the event!

Martin Aspeli announced that he is writing a book about Plone 3, tentatively titled Professional Plone Development.  It will be released this summer, shortly on the heels of Plone 3.

I've been privileged to be one of Martin's reviewers. Professional Plone Development is going to rock.  Hard.  Martin knows Plone 3 as well as anyone alive, and he's got a incredible gift for explaining complex topics in an accessible way.

Plone 3 is going to be a huge leap forward for Plone users, developers and integrators.  Professional Plone Development is going to be an indispensable guide to getting the most out of this amazing new release.  You can pre-order it now for delivery in August.

Congratulations, Martin!  I'm looking forward to celebrating its completion with you in person in a couple of weeks!

I just got back from North Carolina where the Triangle Zope and Python Users Group (TriZPUG) organized a 4-day sprint in Chapel Hill, NC. The sprint brought about 40 folks together following a 4 day training (Camp5). Building on the training in Zope3/Plone3, this was a chance to apply zope3 learnings and contribute to improving Plone and its available tools.

The participants addressed a group of topics that range from bug fixing (Plone 3, syndication), new tools (Grok), and creating new application platforms for Plone (GetPaid). Typical of the intense sprint environment, there was also lots of fun! There were some impressively amusing Lightning Talks, and the BBQSprinter organizers introduced us to the concept of "Pintification". There was also our very own rock concert! We enjoyed many meals in great local restaurants, where bacon was bountiful, as well as our own bbq event. All in all, a great experience!

The organizers brought a group of sponsored sprinters to the event, which helped to create a critical mass of top talent from around the Plone/Zope universe, making it a very fertile environment for development and experimenting. Kapil really showed us how sprinting is done - he spent an evening and into the early morning coding to create a payment processing framework for Plone. The organizers also took advantage of a cool remote access system (Breeze), which enabled people around the world to watch us and the presentations.

Check out camp/sprint culture:

• Del.icio.us tags for bbq-sprint
• Del.icio.us tags for Camp5
• Flickr photo pool
  
• BBQ Sprint page, includes schedule, reports, etc
  

I'm excited to see that Richard Amerman of 7TechNW is starting to offer live online Plone training courses.

His kick-off session, A Short Plone Overview, is scheduled for April 11.  It's targeted at new Plone users and decision makers who are interested in learning more about Plone's capabilities.   At $20 for a 2-hour session, it's a bargain. 

I think this sounds like a great way to introduce folks to Plone, and I'm excited to see the Plone community starting to adopt online training.  I hope it's a successful experiment.

Joel Burton has announced his first three Plone Bootcamp training courses of 2007.  They are:

• Bangalore, India: March 12-16
• Seattle, WA: April 9-13
• Houston, TX: April 16-20

At $450 for a full week of world-class training, it's not only one of the best ways to get up to speed on using and customizing Plone, it's also a tremendous bargain.

I'm really looking forward to welcoming Joel back to Seattle.