Plone Summary of EuroPython

Summary of Plone related events at EuroPython

The Conference "EuroPython":http://www.europython.org/ is the first international European Python conference that was hosted by the Python community at large. The summit brought together some of the most amazing talent in the Python community. "Jython":http://jython.org/ , "Stackless Python":http://www.stackless.com , and "Psyco":http://homepages.ulb.ac.be/~arigo/psyco/ are examples of just some of the technically focused presentations. On the ZOPE track there were some really amazing presentations on Workflow components, CMF and our little project, Plone. All of the presentations that I attended were amazing. Hats off to Tom Deprez and the other EuroPython organizers. The Presentation Alex and I did the last presentation before the Python keynote by Guido in the main presentation hall. We had a really great audience. The presentation was video taped. There were quite a few flashes strobing throughout the presentation. Most importantly we had a ~20x20 ft wall to project Plone onto ;). We focused on selling Plone to the audience. What Plone is. How we see Plone in regards to the Python/ZOPE/CMF communities. Address under what circumstances we were going to release Plone 1.0 under CMF1.3 and Zope2.6. Then finally demonstrate how Plone works and show an example of Plone managing content for a website that looks nothing like Plone. This was the CMFExample website, emerging.com. We ran over the allocated time but Alex and I felt it was a resounding success! What Plone Does Well We are positioning Plone as a entry point for the open source community to become involved with ZOPE and Python. Both Alexander and I came to Python via ZOPE. I didn't appreciate Python until I started getting under the hood of ZOPE and really understanding how to make things work. We are throwing the Plone net very wide open with 1.0 and hope to capture a fairly large share of the existing open source community. Why would they come to Plone? Because it is very easy to use. All people who are using Plone have had resounding end-user success. Plone in relation to Python/ZOPE/CMF Python is one of the most flexible languages. ZOPE is very flexible, although a bit opaque under the hood unless you are very familiar with Python. CMF is the same relation to ZOPE as ZOPE is to Python. Plone is at a high enough level for people to easily expose existing functionality that is not ZOPE specific but keep the Plone UI. There are some research firms that use Plone although most of their functionality is located in another back end server/process. We want people to feel comfortable with Plone enough to be able to pick and choose bits of Plone for their projects to leverage. Plone 1.0 Release Zope2.6 has configurable default views for Folders (directly impacts Plone's UI decisions), ZCTextIndex (searching will yield meaningful results), ZODB cache improvements (keep memory down), SQUID hooks that will allow ZOPE to more easily participate in advanced caching configurations. CMF1.3 should be out in a few days. Florent has apparently steam rolled over most of the CMF bugs. CMF1.3 brings lots of bug fixes and new ideas to Plone. Plone currently has some bits that are against decency and taste and need to be re factored. Before we release a 1.0 - I would feel much more comfortable doing a few alpha/beta releases to make sure all bugs/kinks are worked out. Hopefully we will see the first 1.0a before CMF1.3 is released. Plone Presentation Explained how the tabs were configurable (via portal_actions) as well as the buttons on the folder_contents screen. Gave a brief tour of the interface regarding the typical publishing and metadata screens. Demonstrating the fancy pop-up help boxes that were recently integrated by Alex. I believe we showed off the mass publishing (where you can check several folders and objects) and push them all into specific states. I showed the CMFExample site installed and managing the contents from within the Plone UI. I had a little 'preview' tab on each of the objects and if you clicked on it you could see the emerging website view of the document instead of the Plone view. This went over very very well. Unfortunately the emerging edit_forms have not caught up with the new style sheet for forms so there are red boxes where the textual help use to reside. (maybe someone could fix it ;) We explained that all of Plone validates and the Calendaring widget is responsible for crashing Netscape 4.x. Why? Because the style sheet element does not validate and hosed Netscape. I take responsibility. There are other Netscape 4.x issues but on a whole it works just fine. I don't use Netscape 4.x - so if you are user who is stuck with it and are interested in being a QA contact please email us. After showing off the emerging example, and showing off the mozilla skin we ended the presentation with a very fulfilling applause 8). The last years effort were almost worth that 30 seconds. Conclusion Plone is headed towards Total World Domination. Plone 1.0 will be aimed in such a way that it will be unprecedented ease of setup for people to get Plone running and having immediately useful functionality that is not provided by default in *any* open source content management system. I look forward to integration of Openflow (Activity based workflow) into the CMF and into Plone. Increasing the size of the Plone team. Working with corporations who are interested in leveraging Plone to manage large amounts of content for their website(s). Meeting Alexander Limi and talking for hours upon end in person was a great experience. We know where we want to go. We know approximately how to get there. But most importantly we know *who* we want to use the system. Thanks, **The Plone Team** "EuroPython Opera Slides":http://plone.org/Members/runyaga/europython2002_slides "Supporting Material for Presentation":http://plone.org/Members/runyaga/directions.html