State of Plone
Past and present.
About the format
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Presenters
- Alan Runyan, "Runyaga LLC":http://www.runyaga.com
- Alexander Limi, "Plone Solutions":http://www.plonesolutions.com
Plone Statistics
- 55 000 downloads of Plone
- 70 developers in 25 countries
- 4.5 million on plone.org last month
- 50 messages/day on mailing list
- Conference: 130 participants
What has happened since 1.0?
- Released at SolutionsLinux in Paris
- Four booths of Plone solution providers
- Plone at the IBM booth
- Cebit
The sprints
- Berne sprint, 30 programmers, first Plone Sprint
- Victoria, Canada Sprint
- Padova, Italy Sprint
- What is a sprint?
- Book from Ingeniweb
- Articles - Eweek, LinuxJournal, Programmes
Plone 1.0
- 1.0 got the attention of most people
- Stable, people are deploying it
- Mindshare among people that are not Zope developers
- Plone brings a lot of people to Zope and Python
Plone advantages
- Probably the easiest system out there
- We've become the gold standard for ease of install
- Windows and Mac installers, gotten press at Mac dev
- "It Just Works™"
Ratings
- Austrian Government reviewed 300 Content Management Systems, open source and commercial - Plone was ranked the best for sophisticated deployments
- Danish government: Plone got highest marks for accessibility
Companies
- plone.org/about/sites has grown, focus on high quality
- A lot of companies are depending solely on Plone for their livelihood
- There's a high degree of companies giving back to the community, and helping building the brand
The new users
- Refugee-wise, many more people are coming from J2EE, more than from PHP.
- Not quick and dirty
- Companies are looking for sophisticated systems
Standards
- Accessibility - 508, WAI-AAA - strong focus
- We've been offered a position in the W3C working group on authoring tools and accessibility because of our strong focus on it
- Almost all other systems are copying parts of Plone
- We are leading by example, teaching people how to build standards compliant and accessible sites
International focus
- 30 languages, multi-lingual content types, Placeless Translation Service
- Standard .po files, not a custom solution (poEdit, KBabel)
Development
- Archetypes becoming a standard
- Best-practice
- Features lacking in Zope are being filled in by Archetypes
- References
- Transformation services
- Form generation and validation
Community
- Plone community is healthy, and creates infrastrucure that can be used outside Plone:
- GRUF
- QuickInstaller
- FormController
- Placeless TS
- We show best-practices for Zope and CMF development
- The increasing exposure of Zope/CMF thru Plone helps security
User Interface
- UI overhaul
- More effective
- Easier to use, more explicit
- Provides you with the infrastructure that you would otherwise need to build yourself
What we're not happy with
- 3rd party Products are hard to
- locate
- install
- QA
- Migrations have been painful
What we're not happy with
- Learning process, suffers from the same problems as fledgling Zope developers have
- Still unhappy with the state of documentation, still no clear path to go to easily become Plone-savvy
Mindshare
- Large institutions are starting to look at Plone
- The conference itself is an indication of this
- "You know an open source project has reached a critical mass when there's a conference" gu who linked to pauls website
Castle Sprint
- Castle sprint, 50 developers, 5 days, 10 countries
- Organized by BLueDynamics
- 3sat broadcast Plone into homes of German, Swiss, Austrian people, approx 160 million potential viewers
Future development
- Unit tests, being run every night, over 100 tests, i18n testing to identify missing strings, XHTML validation, ZChecker, WebDAV litmus test
- Release management, Andy McKay
- Stable, regular releases
- PLIP Process getting there
Plone Conference 1
- RealNetworks streaming it
- Over 18 hours of speaking engagements
- Visitors from Japan, India:, Denmark, Italy
- DVD being made
Documentation
- Books coming up, three publishers have Plone books in the works
Python
- Python is gaining in adoption
- Java guys have latched on to it
- Dynamically typed languages are catching on
- Python is the most favored of these
Python
- The real power of Plone is Python!
- Python is everywhere
- IDEs starting to add it - Eclipse
Python and Zope Development
- Remote debugging from:
- Boa
- WingIDE
- Komodo
General progress
- NGOs are starting to use Plone extensively
- People have started offering training in Plone all over the world
Still needs work
- Currently it's too hard to find Plone companies
- Expect this to take some time, but we are ensuring that it's done right, and ensuring quality
- Zope Europe helping out on the business side
- Our vendors are very good community members
Educational sector
- EduPlone, educational effort
- Rice University - Connexions project
Documentation
- ZopeMag as partner, maintain a chapter in the Plone Book
- Will start focusing more on Plone content and articles
Plone Development
- Have a much better system now, much easier to migrate from here
- Plone has had explosive growth in Europe, US is slowly catching on to open source
- Brazilian government is running it
Funding
- You can't just wait for Plone to grow - if you need a feature - sponsor it!
- Specific funding towards core development will help everyone
- We're not the quick and one-off solution, it's robust infrastructure, and that requires time and resources
Funding
- If you discover a grant, pursue it, help grow Plone and Zope
- If you're doing work with Plone, go that extra mile to make it reusable - it's a global win and will be picked up by other developers
- Collective
Technical
- Python 2.2.3 on plone.org
- Python 2.3 will bring speed increases
- Plone is being run on 64-bit processors, Opteron, Hebrew Institute
Project wins
- Tyrell doing work for the largest media distributor in the US
- Abstract Edge did Give Kids the World - currently running ad campaign on US TV
- BGSC.ca - Genome Science Center - Plone site
- Several others view Plone as a competitive advantage
Summary
- Community is healthy
- We're successful in portraying the fact that you don't choose Plone and open source because it is cheaper, but because it's higher quality, open and easily extensible
- It's a product! And an extensible one.