Plone4Artists sprinters improve multimedia in Plone
The first ever Plone sprint in Boston took place July 18-22, 2007. The goal was to improve the multimedia capabilities of Plone and further develop the Plone4Artists suite of products. Over 20 participants sprinted for 5 days, made 6 new product releases and had a whole lot of fun in Beantown.
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.
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.
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 Plone Conference 2007 sprint in Naples, Italy. There will be a multimedia track and we hope to get 1.0 final versions of all the products out at that time. And yes, Plone 3.0 compatible versions too!
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 also created 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