State of Plone

Past and present.

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":http://www.runyaga.com - Alexander Limi, "Plone Solutions":http://www.plonesolutions.com 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.