PloneConf 2008 - Day One
Quick post about what i’ve attended thus far. First and foremost there are 310 people here at PloneConf 2008. This is great!! Most of the guys from the Ny Plone Group are here. The keynote and the “State of Plone” gave a great overview of where Plone 4.0 is headed and generally it’s exciting to be here and around other dedicated content management people. Some of the the great things I have seen up to this point were during the 3-7 minute lightning talks. I’ll probably give one tomorrow or put myself on the standby list. The whole conference is being video taped and broadcasted live.
Google donated a bunch of small mini books and the Plone foundation gave away some t-shirt schwag.
The first scheduled talk I attended on Content Mirroring was also probably the best talk scheduled today. Basically covered using Plone object data via a relational database (or anything else, pretty much) so that others can access, use and build interfaces to the content using a language and tools they are comfortable with; ie without having to do any xml-rpc. That; will definitely come in handy; as it will allow others to access anything in Plone using regular old MySQL/Postgres/BerkeleyDB etc. It even handles content objects that include files; which is absolutely perfect for deployment purposes. Like say, images. NOTE: The content isn’t managed by the content mirror; it’s just mirrored. All of the content data is still put in an object database. It is just replicated wherever you want, according to Kapil it started at around 500 lines of code and now is round just about 1,000 lines. The only problem here is failure; but after speaking with Kapil it doesn’t seem like he wants to complicate it and keeping it simple by pushing that up the stack works; at least for things like mysql/postgres. Here is some background
The other talks didn’t really interest me that much; with the exception of the last talk on Software freedom and computing in the cloud being dangerous which was halfway interesting. Not that all the rest weren’t good but they were pretty surface level and I hoped to learn something new but sadly it was all wrote. I also didn’t realize that openplans.org is a nyc based company. Had an interesting chat with Rob Miller and Kapil on some politics and generally enjoyed myself.
The talk on computing in the cloud really needs it’s own post.
There are core Zope and core Python developers at the conference as well and sadly all of the sprints are going down on Sat/Sun. I’m leaving Friday night and I thought the sprints would of been earlier. Anyway having a good time so far. My brother has a really nice setup down here.. I would still be at the conference if I didn’t need to sleep. I haven’t slept since Monday.
Ran into Ramon and David Bain, trying to get a GnomeWeb-Plone sprint before the weekend.. It’s sad this round may fail because everyone is busy and i’m not doing the lone soldier shit anymore. Wifi coverage at the conf is pretty bad but i’ve been checking my email. I can’t wait to get back to work on the Nymag instance for some reason. I’m not sure how long that urge will last though. People brought their teams and all of these people are well versed on Plone; it’s so fucking REFRESHING to have a conversation and someone understanding the words coming out of your mouth; this latest game at work of change, change, change is getting pretty tiresome. If you change the color of the car mid paint or while it’s drying and it has to be sanded down to the metal frame and repainted; it takes work; even if the color is from red to cherry red. Anyway no more complaining, doesn’t matter, the Plone scene is looking really good; I had no idea Google was actually using it!! The conference is fucking great so far!