German Language Plone Community’s 2019 Networking Kickoff

The Plone Tagung took place once again this year at the University of Munich, February 25-27, 2019, for German-language Plone developers, providers and users.

The Plone Tagung took place once again this year under the auspices of the German University Conference. From the 25th to the 27th of February 2019, developers, providers and users within the German-language Plone community met at the Institute for Informatics at the University of Munich to debate the question “What could the future of Plone look like? 

Keynote Address

Timo Stollenwerk presenting at Plone Tagung

Timo Stollenwerk offered an introduction right off the bat with his keynote address "Plone: User Experience Revisited". During his presentation he talked about his vision for a modern Plone editor. He gave us a peek into Volto, a new approach to integrating a modern user interface with a new editor into Plone.

Volto

Volto is based on ReactJS and represents an alternative to the classic Plone user interface. It is already available for use and will be a standard offering in Plone 6. The classic interface will also remain available, however. This will not change in the near future, given that many users still depend upon it, and alternative interfaces must first stand the test of time.

Python 3

An important issue for the global Plone community is the expiration of support for Python 2.7 on January 1, 2020. With this in mind, Plone developers and integrators are facing the challenge of upgrading Plone sites to Python 3 over the coming months. In his keynote "Python 3 - So What?", Philip Bauer brought the Plone Tagung participants up to date on the upcoming release of Plone 5.2 with Python 3 support. He offered several practical approaches to the community’s burning questions, such as how ongoing projects and add-ons can be migrated to Python 3, what to do with archetype-based content and add-ons that are not supported under Plone 5.2 and Python 3, as well as the time, effort and complications involved and where help can be found.

Twenty-five Presentations

With participants and speakers from Germany, Austria and Switzerland, the Plone Tagung was an international event. The Plone Tagung is an opportunity for everyone to network with other Plonistas, and the 25 presentations topped it all off with a variety of interesting, relevant and broadly-based themes.

Universities

A special subset of participants again this year were representatives of German post-secondary institutions, who attended within the context of the annual University Conference. Many post-secondary institutions use Plone as their content management system, especially the faculties for which performance and security are paramount.

Through presentations and during open discussions, Plone developers, members of the Plone core team, integrators, users, and representatives of post-secondary institutions had the opportunity to exchange ideas and experiences. 

Learning Opportunities

Several of the talks offered learning opportunities and technology demonstrations. Maik Derstappen, for example, demonstrated how a to-do app can be generated as an extension for Plone in under five minutes with the help of PloneCLI. Other presentations focused on case studies in which website projects, intranet projects and other applications have been developed using Plone.

Plone migration was a recurring theme: what challenges are presented by a migration, whether to Plone from other CMSs, or from older to newer versions of Plone, and what tools and approaches should be used? Various editing experiences with Plone – in comparison to those of other open source CMSes, some of whose representatives were also present at the conference – were the subjects of several talks.

Alexander Loechel struck a chord with an emotional appeal to the audience to share upcoming tasks and responsibilities across a wider base, in consideration of the time and emotional well-being of individual community members. An interesting starting point of his personal appeal was the Google Summer of Code project to create an automated listing of all available Plone add-ons on Plone.org. Anyone interested in getting more involved in the Plone community is most welcome and should get in touch over Twitter, Facebook, or through the Plone forum.

Open Spaces – Room for Everyone

Open Spaces are community-tested formats in which everyone is first invited to introduce their topics of interest, whether in presentation, suggestion or request form. Those interested in individual topics then gather in groups for a discussion session. About 10 such sessions took place during the Plone Tagung, focusing not only on technical topics but also on subjects such as cooperative models in software development.

Discussion at Plone Tagung

Quo Vadis Plone?

The conference ended on a positive note with a panel discussion entitled “Quo Vadis Plone?” The discussion seized the reins of the first day’s keynote once again and addressed assumptions relating to the further development and future of Plone. Alexander Pilz, manager of a Munich-based Plone agency, and Jens Klein, member of the Plone Framework Team and manager of an Innsbruck-based Plone agency, answered questions put by Philip Bauer and the audience. Among other topics, the discussion included ideas for how the community might work together more effectively, as well as conceptions of what Plone might look like in 20 years.

For example, it was decided at the Plone Tagung that the Plone brochure is due for a new edition. Assistance on this project is welcome!

Encore: Two Sprint Days

What would a Plone event be without a sprint? Fifteen Plone developers met after the conference to work together on some important issues. Progress was made on the Python 3 migration of add-ons and a prototype was developed of a database for Plone extensions that operates automatically using metadata. In addition, the PloneCLI and its underlying bobtemplates.plone developer tools were optimized for the development of extensions under Python 3 and Python 2.7.

Plone Tagung 2020: Dresden

Of particular importance to the Plone community is promoting community work and giving all members and interested parties the opportunity to get involved during the Plone Tagung while also expanding their networks.

The goal of bringing the German-speaking Plone community from Germany, Austria and Switzerland closer together was successfully realized this year. We want to continue to build on this momentum and we are pleased to announce that the next Plone Tagung will be held in Dresden in 2020.

Let’s make next year an even greater success! We extend our sincerest thanks to all participants, speakers, organizers and sponsors, without whom this event would not have been possible. We hope to see you all again next year at the Plone Tagung 2020 in Dresden. Information on the conference will be published in due time at the Plone Tagung website. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook or in the forum.

View more Plone Tagung photos on Flickr.

Twitter: @plone_de

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/PloneDE

Forum: https://community.plone.org/c/local-communities/german