Every year the Plone conference is an amazing experience. We have been there to tell you what's going on.
Training (27-28 October)
On the first two days we attended the mockup training.
Mockup is a framework aiming to develop reusable page parts called patterns which can be reused in web applications, not necessarily related to Plone.
The training was really effective and after just in a day we were already able to develop our own patterns. The second day was used like a kind of sprint to try to create last missing mockups from Plone.
For those who want to try to use mockup and create new patterns, the documentation used for this training is available online: http://mockup-training.readthedocs.org/
Talk sessions (29-30 October)
The first day was opened by the keynote of Eric Steele showing the new features of Plone5, for example:
- The new toolbar
- Barceloneta theme and customization with the new resource registry tool
- Mockup patterns
- New security settings control panel
- Revisited login form
- Improved security (for example automatic csrf protection)
After that, there was an interesting talk made by Dylan Jay about the user experience and the developers problem in thinking like simple users (also known as the curse of expertise) when they work to find the best solutions that solves their real problems.
In the rest of the morning there were a couple of talks focused on the new Plone theme and UI.
The first, made by Víctor Fernández de Alba and Albert Casado, was about new features in the new Barceloneta theme like rewritten html parts (no more DL in portlets), a better usage of diazo rules and the advice to be more “plonish” trying to use all the base Plone style classes instead of Bootstrap ones.
The second front-end talk was made by Ramon Navarro Bosh and Rob Gietema, and explained what is the new resource registry tool, how it works and how developers can use it to customize the look and feel of a Plone site.
In the afternoon there was the most awaited talk of the conference by Andreas Jung: why Plone is going to die. We all know Andreas's style, and apart from the title, it was a very interesting talk.
He explained some common developer problems with Plone (for example migrations and z3c.form usage) and gived some food for thought and suggestions for the future roadmap of Plone.
That talk, and a lightning talk made by Eric Brehault (Why CMS won’t die), showed us how much we need Plone and how important is to improve it and to keep it as the best CMS in the world.
Nejc Zupan had a talk about services like Travis, Heroku, New Relic and how they can help us to be more productive and automate some parts of develop/releaser process. The most interesting thing was the capability to deploy for free a simple Plone site on the cloud (anyone said Heroku button?).
Another interesting talk was T. Kim Nguyen one about some use cases where Plone proved to be effective in reducing costs, time and frustration when used as a solution to replace paper forms, for example in Universities.
At the end of the day there were many lightning talks.
Among them we want to cite Steve McMahon one about installers that are going to be cloud ready. It’s lightning talk was like a teaser for the open space proposed by Giacomo Spettoli about installers.
On the second day it was possible to see many talks dealing with the new Plone distribution we are developing within the Plone Intranet Consortium leaded by Guido Stevens.
The Plone Intranet Consortium has the vision to deliver a bundle of add-ons for Plone to better suit a single but important use case. Erico Andrei was later that day explaining how important it is to focus on similar “Plone sistributions” for other use cases. Many agency were doing something similar in the past years, and also RedTurtle was effective in providing one for the Italian public administration.
We were impressed by the work done by Eric Brehault on his through the web solution that allows anybody to implement new functionality in Plone: Rapido. Eric rewrote Plomino from scratch keeping the best of it and removing all the questionable parts.
Rapido can now handle better packages, making it easier to re-share deploy and test the functionality developed with it. In addition it is engineered in such a way that it can work both on top of Plone and Substance-D.
The environment of the Plone products can take advantage of the EEA developers which were showcasing (with Alin Voinea) their new products focused on collaborative editing, documents flow management and printing.
Open space day (31 October)
On the open space day it was great to see Martin Aspeli moderating the really crowded session about the Plone 2020 roadmap. Using agile techniques he was able to collect ideas from all the participants and to spot out conclusions about what we should do and why we should care to Plone.
As mentioned, Giacomo was leading the open space for installers, in order to give to all the users the chance to install with as little effort as possible our CMS.
In another open spaces, there were interesting discussions about how the plone.api should be inserted in the core packages for making core code more readable and setting a good example for integrators looking into the core code for example on how things work.
Really crowded was also the open space lead by Guido on behalf of the Plone Intranet Consurtium, after which the consortium got new members and sprinters for the next day.
An other open space was dedicated to the development of a rest/json api, that will make similar approaches to Plone even easier to implement.
Sprints (1-2 November)
The last two days were dedicated to sprints (unfortunately we could attend just the first day).
There was an impressive list of proposed sprints and so many people attended that we had to book another sprinting room at the Thistle hotel.
As always, it was amazing to see so many people working together, help each other to solve problems and exchange ideas to improve our beloved Plone.
The conference week was great.
Many old and new friends, lots of work and learning but also fun and liters of very good beer.
During the conference, there were also announced the next important events for the Plone community:
- Alpine City Sprint (Innsbruck, 21-25 January)
- 4 digits Anniversary sprint (Arnhem, 22-26 June)
- Plog (Sorrento, April)
- Plone Symposium Tokyo (Tokyo, May/July)
- Plone Conference 2015 (Bucarest, 12/18 October)
We would like to thank Netsight, Enquos and all the sponsors to make this happen.
And now, some references to media resources related to this conference:
- The amazing real-time transcriptions of talks made by Maurits Van Reese in his blog
- Vimeo channel with all the talks
- A list of slideshare presentations
- Our Facebook album
See you in Bucarest!