Plone Conference 2020 Recap

The annual Plone Conference in December 2020 was held 100% online and gathered together people from all over the world.

Plone Conference 2020 Online

Plone Conference 2020 was a 9-day event for the Plone, Zope, Volto, Guillotina & Pyramid communities and consisted of training, talks, and sprints. The conference provided insight into the long history of Plone CMS as well as the latest, future-proof features and visions.

• Plone - The original, open-source, enterprise-grade, all-in-one content management system written in Python.
• Zope - The original Python web application server - the foundation for Plone and inspiration for Guillotina.
• Volto - Plone's snappy, modern React front end powered by the RestAPI.
• Guillotina - A re-imagined asynchronous back end compatible with Plone's RestAPI.
• Pyramid - Pyramid is a small, fast, down-to-earth Python web framework.

With 295 attendees from 30+ countries from over the world, from Jamaica to Japan, USA to the UK, Germany to Finland, and Austria to Australia the conference was a definite success. We had newcomers to the community, as well as long time contributors since the early days of Plone. 

With the help of our sponsors, like iMio and Syslab, and many others, the conference was held 100% Online, using LoudSwarm platform by Six Feet Up. LoudSwarm nicely combined video streaming, recordings, schedules and chat discussion.

Every training, talk, and presentation was recorded and will be available online on YouTube later.

Group Photo of Plone Confercence 2020.

Training

The conference contained, like in previous years, over 30 hours of free training, with topics including Mastering Plone, Volto Addons, Pyramid, and Guillotina.

https://2020.ploneconf.org/schedule

The training videos are already publicly available on YouTube.

Talks and Open Spaces

4 days of talks included almost 60 professional presentations, ranging from different use cases to building and managing projects into very technical talks about some aspect of a certain technology. Many of the talks focused on Volto, Plone's new React based frontend, and there was also lots of discussion about the future of Plone 6.

With Open spaces and 5 min lightning talks, it was possible to bring into focus many other aspects and topics.

Some highlights of talks: 

• Keynote: State of Plone

• Volto: Past, Present and Future

• Building a Multiconference Solution on Plone 5.2

• The effectiveness of open source to achieve a common heritage for cities / L’efficacité de l’open source pour développer un patrimoine logiciel commun à un groupement de villes

• Volto Dexterity Schema and Layout editor

• Running Plone on AWS

• Keynote: The User Experience - Editing Composite Pages in Plone 6 and Beyond

• Plone 6 Theming from Scratch

• Your Plone [Intranet] in a Box™

• Oh, the Places we've been! Plone 2001 - 2020

And many more! https://2020.ploneconf.org/schedule

Day 4 Keynote.

Sprints

Every Plone Conference has contained 2 days of sprinting so after the conference talks people still gathered together and improved and developed Plone ecosystem forward.

Sprint topics included e.g.

• Newbies Introduction to Plone Development
• Plone Foundation Sponsorships
• Plone Classic UI
• ES6/Mockup/Patternslib
• Volto
• Unified Field for Images and Files (PLIP 2968)
• Pylons Project projects (Pyramid, Deform, and others)
• plone.importexport
• Plone.org improvement

We will publish a separate sprint report on Plone.org to cover further details.

Community

Plone community aims to be the most welcoming and friendly community towards new and old people alike. We are happy to report that this conference had many new faces and we sincerely hope, that everyone felt the love.

On the communal aspects, check out the presentation

Oh, the Places we've been! Plone 2001 - 2020

Every conference has a party, and this was no different, except beside the fact that everyone was online this time.

Thank you, everyone, sponsors, organizers, trainers, presenters, and especially participants for making this year's conference one to remember!

Discussion during the conference.

Next year: Plone 20-year birthday, Plone Conference 2021 in Belgium!

This year's conference was in many ways very special, and next year even more so - Plone is celebrating its 20-year birthday, and if the situation allows, the conference will be held in Namur, Belgium!

So mark your calendars and stay tuned for Plone Conference 2021 news! Follow @ploneconf and #ploneconf2021 on Twitter and Instagram.