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State of Plone by Limi and Alan
During the key note speech by Alexander Limi and Alan Runyan at Plone Symposium, the following interesting Statistics were mentioned:
- Plone supports 50 translations out of the box
- There are about 300+ add-on products available for Plone
- In 2005, the Plone direct downloads were 250,000+
The biggest strength of Plone is the way it handles migrations. Most of the commercial content management companies make money from migration projects. With Plone, customers get the migration for free. Alaxendar Limi mentioned that a huge effort is required to provide "in place" migration for the content (which is the process as of today). In future, the strategy for migration will be different. The content (hierarchy, security, data, rules, content relationships etc) from the old Plone site will be extracted (exported) out to an external storage (may be a combination of XML files and binary files). Users will then create a new Plone site (latest one) and dump (import) all the data back. This strategy seems to be less painful and more efficient.
Right now, Plone development team receives very little feedback. Limi requested all the Plone users to provide valuable feedback to Plone development team.
There were interesting comments about the Plone future roadmap. Plone 2.5 release focuses on infrastructural changes and Plone 3.0 focuses on User Interface. Some one asked if Plone 3.0 is going to run on Zope 3.0. The answer is no. Plone 3.0 runs on Zope 2 technologies (mostly Zope 2.9). During dinner time, we had various conversations about Plone running on Zope 3.0 technologies etc. I liked Alan's comments: "You stick with Plone and we will take you to Zope 3.0 whenever it is appropriate".
Overall the conference is very well received. All the talks (including the case studies) were good. I uploaded some of the photographs at:
http://www.plonelive.com/albums/psym2006/view
The Plone Symposiums and Plone Conferences are focused to provide information to "Plone Developers". I strongly believe that we must attract more customers to participate in these events and conferences. One way of attracting end customers is to have "domain specific" tracks such as "Plone in Education", "Plone in Government" and "Plone in Media" etc. What do you suggest?
presentations
Conference Presentations Online
http://plone.org/events/regional/nola06/presentation-material-and-video
The PCL/PrimaGIS project (http://www.primagis.fi/) held a sprint last week in Ireland to bring the stack closer to Zope 3. If there had been a track on "Plone in the geospatial community" (probably a sub-track of "Plone in the scientific community" ??), I bet there would have been a stronger incentive to hold a short sprint at the symposium premisses, either before or after. Sprints and conferences are tough on people, so I guess the key here is to keep the activities short : a 1-2 day sprint for those who want it followed by a 2-day conference seems.
A 2-day conference is good enough for most users IMO, give or take a tutorial/sprint day. I don't think it would be a good idea to explode the conference/symposium to a e.g. 4-day event to absorb a high number of tracks. I would go for short half day tracks. Two or three good conferences are enough : the rest happens in sprint or hotel rooms or bars :-). Sprint results could even be demonstrated as impromptu BOF's. I could easily picture myself inviting a customer : come and see us at the Plone Symposium. Developers of the software *you* use will be there and with any luck you might find the feature you put in the project bug tracker a couple of months ago is on it's way to working status after the sprint !
Cheers to this great community!
Yves Moisan
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