Once again I made the annual pilgrimage I make to the home of amazing food, ice cream, sunshine and amazing people -- The Plone Open Garden in Sorrento. This is now something like the 5th time I think I've headed to Italy for this event. Originally born as the European Plone Symposium it was renamed the Plone Open Garden to reflect the nature of the event. That is the 'Open Space' concept, but taken outside into the beautiful surroundings of the Hotel Mediteranneo just outside Sorrento. This year, Ben Ackland our Projects Director at Netsight also attended, as did my wife and daughter. We did the usual route of flying from Bristol to Rome direct with Easyjet then renting a car and driving from Rome to Sorrento. This time we had another passenger in the form of Mikko Ohtamaa (sans katana) whom we met at the airport and all drove down together. I'm now pretty used to driving in Italy, and once you get used to the fact everyone is out to kill you, and road markings and indicators mean nothing, it is fine.
Over the years, the attendance figures for this event have risen and fallen, usually depending on the general economy and what other events are going on in the Plone Calendar. E.g. last year, with main Plone Conference in Europe the attendance was lower; this year, with the main conference in Brazil, it was back up to around 60 people. Each year the concept is refined a bit more and this year I think they got it spot on. There were four or five 30-minute scheduled talks each morning from 9:30am downstairs in the conference room. Then everyone headed upstairs to the hotel lobby/bar area or outside to the garden for discussions, followed by lunch. After lunch, the combination of 'Open Space' talks and sprints kicks in to full flow.
Last year I thought things were a little bit too relaxed and it was easy to become un-productive without a clear idea of what was happening when. This year there was a bit less 'Italian Time' ;) and things generally ran to schedule meaning people were able to better plan their days. We had report-outs at 6pm every evening by the pool in which everyone got a chance to talk about what they had been working on that day. As is inevitable when you have such great people together feeding ideas of each other, there were people working well into the early hours of the morning.
Talks
There were twenty talks in total, ranging from project management tools, to new Plone add-ons, to testing. All the talks were great, but my personal highlights:
Collective.local - Thomas Desvenain & PloneSocial - Guido Stevens
What I liked about these two talks is that (by coincidence I think) they were symbiotic. Both of them implemented ideas in Plone by leveraging the existing content types in Plone and building on existing infrastructure. I think that shows the level of maturity Plone has reached. 5 years ago you would be creating new content types to deal with this, but the fact it can be done using existing types and machinery is great. Collective.local is a set of packages that allow the creation of local 'workspaces' in Plone. This is concept I have seen implemented over and over again in Plone. So much so I think it must be some kind of right of passage for a Plone developer to try to implement this. This is by far the best implementation I've seen so far.
Guido Stevens was showing off how far Plone Social has come in the past year. I remember sitting down with him in Sorrento a year ago looking at it, and it has come a long way and a lot of the reservations I had last year about performance have been squashed. What I really loved about this talk was the insight and theory that Guido was able to bring to the subject. He has clearly done a lot of research into the topic of social in the enterprise and *why* people would want to use it. He even went as far as proposing what Web 3.0 will look like. A brave guy ;) During the Sprint Guido worked on getting PloneSocial working within the spaces created by collective.local.
Agile values, methods and software. How RedTurtle is moving into this exciting world - Massimo Azzolini
What struck me here was that if you did a search and replace of RedTurtle with Netsight, then this could be our story and experiences with Agile. Massimo talked about how they approach agile and how they have come up with a hybrid approach combining both Scrum and Kanban to solve their needs. He also demonstrated their project management tool called Penelope which had really nice integration with Google Docs for storing and working on project documentation.
Visualising Open Data with Plone - Antonio De Marinis
Antonio works for the European Environment Agency, a big Plone user. They have released a number of great Plone addons out there under the eea.* namespace. Many people know of their faceted searching add-on. This talk was mainly about their work with open data and SPARQL. I've known of SPARQL for many years now; it is a SQL-like query language for data sets. However I never really 'got it'. I didn't quite see the point of it. Until this talk. By being able to do SQL-like joins across datasets from different data sources, you see the power of it. ie. he showed a query that combined city population data from one source with geographical position data from another source to map cities by population on a map. Suddenly I 'got it'. When you start being able to query and combine multiple data sources from different open data sources around the world you can truly start to reveal interesting stats. He also demo'd their visualisation package eea.daviz which enables you to easily visualise this data.
Write the docs - Mikko Ohtamaa
Mikko is known for his no-nonsense presenting style. And this was no exception ;) He talked about the new developer site at http://developer.plone.org. This is the latest version of the Plone Developer Manual he started a few years ago. It now has the ability to be directly edited from within GitHub so you don't even need to check it out to do any work.
He made the ultimatum that anyone who had not committed an update to the developer manual by the end of the next day would be going for a swim in the (rather cold) swimming pool with him. He is a Finn. Do not mess with him.
Writing Functional Tests for Plone using Robot Framework - Asko Soukka
Testing, testing, testing. It always comes up in conference talks. I guess as a community we should be glad we have people like Asko and Rok Garbas who are so passionate about testing. Whilst so many people see it as a tedious process, these are developers that are working hard to make our lives as easy as possible.
The Robot Framework allows tests to be written in a very simple pseudo-english language to do functional tests on a site. It integrates with Sauce Labs to run functional tests (including all the Javascript whizzyness we have today) on multiple browsers remotely. Sauce Labs record the screen of the actual tests and produce videos of the test runs so you can see exactly what is going on...
....then... probably one of the best sprint hacks I've seen in a long time... he extended it to allow you to annotate the screen as the tests were run. This ends up generating informational screencasts for people directly from your tests. How many times have you had to manually create screencasts for clients or developers to illustrate a point or train them on how to do a task? This allows you to write the screencast as a test then just simply run it. You can then guarantee that your documentation screencast is kept up to date with the functional tests. I really look forward to playing with this in the near future. As someone who still drags their heels a bit with testing (especially functional testings) I see it as a way to generate screencasts that as a side effect gives you tests ;)
Plone and Single-Sign On - Active Directory and the Holy Grail - Matt Hamilton
I gave a talk on Single Sign-on in Plone and describing the use case of a recent project we completed for the National Health Service in the UK. I demonstrated a package netsight.windowsauthplugin that I first showcased in San Francisco 18 months ago. I finally released it at the Plone Conference in Arnhem and it has had a bit more testing and use in the real world. It was great to show SSO working in a heterogeneous environment with it working on Windows, OSX, Linux and against MIT kerberos servers and Windows Active Directory simultaneously.
State of Plone.com | Launch Strategy - Armin Stross-Radschinski
This is a project that is very close to my heart as I am currently the chair of the Marketing Committee of the Plone Foundation. The redevelopment of plone.com is a project that has been underway for quite some time and concreate results are coming out and we are not far from launch now. Armin detailed the background of the project, the current status and the design concept. We now have the initial HTML mockup design in GitHub and I worked on deploying a new Plone instance for us to put content into. Using Diazo we will be able to integrate the HTML mockup from the designers with the content in the Plone site. Both can be independently worked on which should help with our workflow and help to visualise the content requirements as we go along.
Plone for scientific purposes: the case of WMO Sand and Dust Storm Warning Advisory and Assessment System (SDS-WAS) - Francesco Benincasa
This talk was about the use of Plone in the World Meteorological Organisation's Sand and Dust Storm warning system. It showcased the add-on products they are using and the ones they have created for mapping meteorological data and to communicate with people. What I specifically liked about this talk was that it was from someone who I've not met before in the Plone Community, and whom is generally one of those 'hidden' Plone developers working away within an organisation on Plone. There are many people like this around the globe and I hope he had a welcome introduction to the wider Plone community.
Open Space & Sprints
After the scheduled morning talks, the afternoon was spent either in Open Space discussions or sprinting on particular topics. I personally was mainly discussing the Plone Marketing effort and what we have to do next along the plan.
I've already covered a number of Sprint items above in the talks section. A full list of the sprint topics and reports can be found on the Coactivate site:
http://www.coactivate.org/projects/plog2013
Sorrento
I hate to say it, but after all these years coming to this event I had still never actually managed to venture beyond the Hotel Mediteranno itself (well apart from two years ago when I stupidly left my bag in the car at the motorway services and it got stolen). So this year I planned to actually get into the city itself to see some of it. I had planned to try and get over to the Island of Capri, but the day I planned to go it was just too windy and I didn't think the cable cars at the top would be running. Maybe next year. So this year I finally dragged myself away from the hotel to hop onto the free shuttle bus into the city. There we found a limitless supply of ice cream stands and shops selling pasta, lemon-based-produce, chocolates, coffee etc. Not a place for those with weak wills. Like me.
Family
One of the great attractions of the Plone Open Garden is it's family-friendly atmosphere. I took my Wife and 2-year old daughter, Sarah with me to the event. Sarah was one of about seven kids there are the event. Whilst it was a bit colder than on previous years we did mange about half an hour one day in the pool at the hotel.
Oh and she ate a LOT of ice cream :) With a free shuttle bus from the hotel going to/from the centre every hour or so it was simple for my wife and Sarah to go for a wander around the city whilst I was at the conference.
The hotel make kids very welcome, and hearing a 2-year old chanting 'Go Plone! Go Plone!' during the sprint report outs was indeed very cute :) She spent most of her time running around with Martin Opstad Reistadbakk (martior)'s daughter or jumping about with Rosario Savarese (Abstract CEO)'s son. Who knows... maybe the next Plone generation in a few years?
So once again, my thanks to the team at Abstract.it for their great work and the staff at Hotel Mediterraneo for their hospitality. And of course, most importantly thanks to the Plone attendees from around the world that came together to make it such a fantastic event.