Plone Booth at Gilbane Conference a Success

The Plone Foundation booth at Gilbane Boston attracted the attention of CMS evaluators and analysts.

The Gilbane Conference, organized by the Gilbane Group, is focused on web and enterprise content management. The event is attended by CMS analysts, IT strategists, and enterprise decision makers from all industries. Plone joined 30+ other organizations on the exhibit floor with a demo station, banner, handouts, and an enthusiastic crew who introduced many conference goers to Plone.

The attendees of the event were able to see live demonstrations of Plone showing the features that were important in their decision making process. Talking with people about open source development created a lot of opportunities to discuss benefits such as ease to market and the flexibility of customized development offered by Plone.

The Foundation utilized a number of resources to present information at our Plone booth. Six Feet Up provided a Plone 4.1 demo site loaded up with sample content. Jazkarta's Nate Aune set up Plone 4.2 demo sites with a variety of products installed on different cloud platforms. Attendees were impressed that these sites could be so easily deployed from buildouts on github. These sites showcased out of the box responsive theming of Plone using beyondskins.responsive. A 4.2 Plone site with minimal add-ons is still available on dotCloud. Thanks to the easy to use Plone installer, we were able to quickly set up a local site when it became clear that the conference network would not support interactive demos. And we played Eric Steele's screencast to demonstrate the upcoming Plone 4.3 through the web Plone theming.

The booth also showcased a slideshow of Plone sites and features, which we played when we weren't doing a live demo or running other screencasts. It is available as a PDF from

Slideshare

and as a movie from the Jazkarta site.

Booth staff wore matching tee shirts supplied by Jazkarta, which helped us attract attention. We raffled off 4 of the shirts to appreciative conference attendees.

Many thanks to our Plone community members for helping spread the word about Plone.

  • Plone consultants: Nate Aune and Sally Kleinfeldt from Jazkarta, Carol Ganz and John Gilpin from Six Feet Up, and Michael Trachtman and Kevin Harvey from story+structure.
  • Plone enthusiasts: David Buck, Aaron VanDerlip, and Ricardo Newbery.