General information

You can get your content listed on plone.org quite easily by signing up for a user account and adding your content in the correct section.

However, there are some rules that apply, and we'll try to cover these below.

News items

News items are designed to list happenings that are in the community's interest. In general, we do not allow purely commercial news announcements on plone.org, but there are some exceptions, listed below.

Things that should not be listed at news items:

• General product releases (use the Products area instead)
• Training announcements (use the Event type, keyword Training - more information below)
• Generic commercial announcements (Company X offers Y, Company X delivers Plone site to Y)

There are some exceptions to this, however. If a news item is considered particularly relevant even if it falls into these categories, it can be admitted. The condition is that the news item needs to focus on the results of what the news item is about, not about the company that delivered it.

To better illustrate what kind of items are allowed under this approach, here are some real-world examples of news announcements that were approved under this rule:

Plone helps raise $14M for tsunami victims for Oxfam

Published by Enfold Systems, who delivered the site and is mentioned in the announcement too - but the good PR for Plone this creates along with the focus on what was accomplished (as opposed to the company focus) makes this news item eligible.

Plone gets Danish Accessibility Award

Published by Headnet, this item highlights how a company helps Plone get awards for its accessibility instead of trying to push the company story.

Plone Bootcamps

Joel Burton offers low-cost Plone training that also gives back to the user groups — they get a cut of the training fees. This exemplifies an approach that is socially responsible (in a Plone sense) and gives back to the community, and illustrates how to give back to the community in a good way.

LinguaPlone donated to the Plone Foundation

Plone Solutions donates the multilingual content management product to the Plone Foundation. This mentions the company, but focuses on the outcome, as in the previous examples.

Note to plone.org reviewers: If your company creates an announcement, you should never approve it yourself, as you are not a neutral party.

Training listings

We allow commercial training listings on plone.org. The condition is that these are clearly marked as such, and the way to do this is:

• Log in to be able to add content
• Add an event in the training section (link in the training listing on the front page)
• Make sure your content has the keyword Training selected
• The title should be something like "Company X: Basic Plone training" to indicate that it's not an event organized by the Plone team
• Submit the event for publication

Conferences, Regional Symposia and Sprints

The rule for what kind of content each type of event is allowed is as follows:

Conferences, Symposia, Sprints

All of these can issue news items about what they are up to, and recruit people and get attention that way. Sponsor logos are allowed in all of these announcements.

Sprint

Allowed to put sponsor logos on the sprint pages and in the sprint report news items.

Regional Symposium

Are allowed to put banners on the front page, and have sponsor links in the footer for the duration of the symposium (but not in the weeks leading up to the event).

Conference

This is defined as the worldwide yearly gathering of Plone people (and is known as the "Plone Conference"), and as such get to do pretty much whatever they want. This includes banners on the front page, sponsor links in the footer of every page on plone.org for the duration of the event — as well as the weeks leading up to the event.

The reasoning behind this is:

• Content "above the fold" (ie. the visible part of the page in an average-size browser window) is for people that aren't necessarily into Plone, but are looking for information about the project.
• Content "below the fold" is for people that are already part of the Plone community in some way - and advertises stuff like training, events, news and product releases. People that are interested in this info have already committed to Plone in some way or another.
• A conference shows that the project is sustainable, and is a perfect "first experience" for people that are sitting on the fence about whether to chose Plone or not.
• Sprints, on the other hand, assume that you have already started digging into Plone a bit, and you're interested in improving Plone itself (or important add-on products) with the knowledge you have obtained. Sprints are very specific, and hard to explain to an outsider that knows nothing about Plone.
• There are often a lot of overlapping (or very close) sprints going on. If we were going to be fair about this — as an example — when this is written, the next two months have 3-4 sprints going on. Giving all these space on the front page is not realistic.
• Thus, an event + one or more news item is the way to do sprint announcements, whereas conferences and symposia will get a bit more real estate since they are considered relevant for even new users.

Reviewer rules

For the people that are designated as reviewers on plone.org, there are a couple of rules to observe:

• Don't approve your own content, especially stuff that goes on the front page.
• Exceptions are generally documentation content that is less comprehensive (FAQs, Error References), but even these should in be reviewed by others in the documentation team if possible.
• Specific instructions for documentation reviewers can be found here.