About the format

• If you are using Opera or any other browser with support for presentation CSS, going into full-screen mode will automatically turn this page into a slide show

Presenters

• Alan Runyan, Runyaga LLC
• Alexander Limi, Plone Solutions

Plone Statistics

• 55 000 downloads of Plone
• 70 developers in 25 countries
• 4.5 million on plone.org last month
• 50 messages/day on mailing list
• Conference: 130 participants

What has happened since 1.0?

• Released at SolutionsLinux in Paris
• Four booths of Plone solution providers
• Plone at the IBM booth
• Cebit

The sprints

• Berne sprint, 30 programmers, first Plone Sprint
• Victoria, Canada Sprint
• Padova, Italy Sprint
• What is a sprint?
• Book from Ingeniweb
• Articles - Eweek, LinuxJournal, Programmes

Plone 1.0

• 1.0 got the attention of most people
• Stable, people are deploying it
• Mindshare among people that are not Zope developers
• Plone brings a lot of people to Zope and Python

Plone advantages

• Probably the easiest system out there
• We've become the gold standard for ease of install
• Windows and Mac installers, gotten press at Mac dev
• "It Just Works™"

Ratings

• Austrian Government reviewed 300 Content Management Systems, open source and commercial - Plone was ranked the best for sophisticated deployments
• Danish government: Plone got highest marks for accessibility

Companies

• plone.org/about/sites has grown, focus on high quality
• A lot of companies are depending solely on Plone for their livelihood
• There's a high degree of companies giving back to the community, and helping building the brand

The new users

• Refugee-wise, many more people are coming from J2EE, more than from PHP.
• Not quick and dirty
• Companies are looking for sophisticated systems

Standards

• Accessibility - 508, WAI-AAA - strong focus
• We've been offered a position in the W3C working group on authoring tools and accessibility because of our strong focus on it
• Almost all other systems are copying parts of Plone
• We are leading by example, teaching people how to build standards compliant and accessible sites

International focus

• 30 languages, multi-lingual content types, Placeless Translation Service
• Standard .po files, not a custom solution (poEdit, KBabel)

Development

• Archetypes becoming a standard
• Best-practice
• Features lacking in Zope are being filled in by Archetypes
  • References
  • Transformation services
  • Form generation and validation

Community

• Plone community is healthy, and creates infrastrucure that can be used outside Plone:
  • GRUF
  • QuickInstaller
  • FormController
  • Placeless TS
• We show best-practices for Zope and CMF development
• The increasing exposure of Zope/CMF thru Plone helps security

User Interface

• UI overhaul
  • More effective
  • Easier to use, more explicit
• Provides you with the infrastructure that you would otherwise need to build yourself

What we're not happy with

• 3rd party Products are hard to
  • locate
  • install
  • QA
• Migrations have been painful

What we're not happy with

• Learning process, suffers from the same problems as fledgling Zope developers have
• Still unhappy with the state of documentation, still no clear path to go to easily become Plone-savvy

Mindshare

• Large institutions are starting to look at Plone
• The conference itself is an indication of this
• "You know an open source project has reached a critical mass when there's a conference" gu who linked to pauls website

Castle Sprint

• Castle sprint, 50 developers, 5 days, 10 countries
• Organized by BLueDynamics
• 3sat broadcast Plone into homes of German, Swiss, Austrian people, approx 160 million potential viewers

Future development

• Unit tests, being run every night, over 100 tests, i18n testing to identify missing strings, XHTML validation, ZChecker, WebDAV litmus test
• Release management, Andy McKay
• Stable, regular releases
• PLIP Process getting there

Plone Conference 1

• RealNetworks streaming it
• Over 18 hours of speaking engagements
• Visitors from Japan, India:, Denmark, Italy
• DVD being made

Documentation

• Books coming up, three publishers have Plone books in the works

Python

• Python is gaining in adoption
• Java guys have latched on to it
• Dynamically typed languages are catching on
• Python is the most favored of these

Python

• The real power of Plone is Python!
• Python is everywhere
• IDEs starting to add it - Eclipse

Python and Zope Development

• Remote debugging from:
  • Boa
  • WingIDE
  • Komodo

General progress

• NGOs are starting to use Plone extensively
• People have started offering training in Plone all over the world

Still needs work

• Currently it's too hard to find Plone companies
• Expect this to take some time, but we are ensuring that it's done right, and ensuring quality
• Zope Europe helping out on the business side
• Our vendors are very good community members

Educational sector

• EduPlone, educational effort
• Rice University - Connexions project

Documentation

• ZopeMag as partner, maintain a chapter in the Plone Book
• Will start focusing more on Plone content and articles

Plone Development

• Have a much better system now, much easier to migrate from here
• Plone has had explosive growth in Europe, US is slowly catching on to open source
• Brazilian government is running it

Funding

• You can't just wait for Plone to grow - if you need a feature - sponsor it!
• Specific funding towards core development will help everyone
• We're not the quick and one-off solution, it's robust infrastructure, and that requires time and resources

Funding

• If you discover a grant, pursue it, help grow Plone and Zope
• If you're doing work with Plone, go that extra mile to make it reusable - it's a global win and will be picked up by other developers
• Collective

Technical

• Python 2.2.3 on plone.org
• Python 2.3 will bring speed increases
• Plone is being run on 64-bit processors, Opteron, Hebrew Institute

Project wins

• Tyrell doing work for the largest media distributor in the US
• Abstract Edge did Give Kids the World - currently running ad campaign on US TV
• BGSC.ca - Genome Science Center - Plone site
• Several others view Plone as a competitive advantage

Summary

• Community is healthy
• We're successful in portraying the fact that you don't choose Plone and open source because it is cheaper, but because it's higher quality, open and easily extensible
• It's a product! And an extensible one.