Christopher Warner

So, the final day at PloneConf 2008 was interesting. Many good topics covered and many good talks. Met a lot of people and sadly didn’t have any cards to give anyone. I’ll try to have this rectified but thanks to the Google associating everything I do with my name it’s pretty easy to find me. David Bain gave an excellent talk on using Plone in an EC2 instance which was great. However, the most interesting conversation was actually in regards to getting the word out about Plone. We pale in comparison to the numbers at other content management events and really it’s for no other good reason than the fact we aren’t making things easy for people and then on-top of that we aren’t very vocal. The one thing I took from the conference is that we should be making these ideas more tangible, the new “plone.org” that was previewed was excellent and it’s definitely a step in the right direction. We need more easy tutorials, make things easier to theme. Espouse some of the core concepts involved in content management. It’s always the case that the best technology doesn’t always win and it would really be a tough pill to swallow if as a community we couldn’t recruit more developers and people who really are passionate about content management. I think a good tutorial for business and management types is also in order… There aren’t enough hours, just not enough. All in all I left feeling good about the future of Plone and psyched about some of the ways I was seeing it used and I hope PloneConf 2009 is just as great! So until then; it’s back to work.

Day two also had great talks.. Alexander gave a rough overview of what the Plone 4 UI is going to look like which gave me lots of ideas. Some of the ideas of having a module builder or widget builder are ideas that I have heard already spoken a New York Mag and it would certainly be useful for content editors to put together small widgets that displayed X list or pieces of content. Writing a routine for that would be cool. There is a lot of work for me to do; lots. So i’m going to petition for some more Plone developers who understand Plone and the concepts that I’m speaking of. There is another developer at nymag working with Plone but I’ve been wrapped up in my own stuff to find out if he’s having any problems but I guess not. I know for me personally it was difficult taking everything in but I guess it’s easier for others.

Anyway, simplfying the UI is a good thing and making Plone easier to skin is also a good thing. Martin Aspeli’s talk about basically making Plone easier to learn was a great talk. Making things simple for beginners will speed up the learning process. As it stands right now one has to be dedicated and a highly proficient python programmer to get anything done off the beaten path with Plone and there is no reason it needs to be that way. The other talks were pretty much surface as well so I spent the rest of the day really reworking my initial Plone World Day draft. It was what I believe to be too involved even for a developer audience. So, I started breaking out those ideas into what i’m calling the “paper version” of my talk that will accompany the presentation and a much much much simpler talk in general. As I started breaking stuff out it’s obvious there’s so much to cover that I may indeed at some point have to write a book someday. This will not be on my blog; the paper will probably be put somewhere on nymag.com first after I figure out the details. Technically speaking this talk wasn’t being sponsored by New York Media but since I worked on it during New York Media time; I guess you can say they allowed it to occur. I’m pretty anal about shit like that due to past transgressions. I’ll eventually publish it here if possible; the slides will be available here soon as they are complete. In the event that New York Media declines permission for whatever reason. Be prepared to bring voice recorders for my talk and i’ll bring some hard copies to hand out. That; or i’ll total revise the entire paper. I don’t think it’ll get that bad though

Spoke with some people, generally enjoyed myself, had dinner at this place called Heidis Brooklyn Deli. The food here was great and the people who work there assured me that they aren’t subway. Everything is made from scratch right in that place and it taste just like that! Then I went to play some billiards and I don’t know how I got so much better but it must be because I haven’t played in a couple of days. Cleaned up!  The shots I was making, wish I had a camera.