Inspired by another great Plone Conference in Naples
This year, I was looking forward to only travel 10 hours to the conference in Italy. Last year it took me a whole 20 hours to get Seattle. And you know what, I'll travel 40 hours if it means I can experience the magic that a Plone conference delivers. What impressed me most about this year's conference was the level of self-reflection the community had about how we got to where we are and what the current state of Plone is.
Where are we? Some say we have the best content management system on the planet. If this is true or not is not really relevant, since Plone cares more about what its users want and experience than the amount of market speak that rings true. The self-reflection I'm talking about were most obvious in Lennart Regebro's talk, What Zope did wrong, Andy Mckay's talk, What Plone can learn from Rails and the case study panel, So you want to be a Plone consultant.
Lennart's talk was enlightening on many levels. He presented a very clear picture of how Zope 2 was too tightly coupled and how Zope 3 tried to solve this. Zope 2 has often been called unpythonic and the fact that its components are so tightly coupled makes it very difficult to reuse Zope code outside of a Zope application. So although the rest of the Python community can learn from Zope, there is no easy way for them to actually use the code that is written in Zope land. I finally understood why I have been getting blank stares and no interest when I presented the stack of Zope technologies at our local Python user group - they simply didn't feel safe swallowing the whole pill when they are only interested in a few cool things like ZPublisher or Page Templates. After listening to Lennart's talk one certainly feels that we are moving in the right direction with the adoption of Zope 3. The separation that Zope 3 offers might make more of Zope accessible to the rest of the Python community, but that doesn't mean that they will actually use it though. This is not really the point I'm trying to make. The fact that we, the Zope and Plone community, do consider our flaws in a open and public forum and go to great trouble to correct them is unique about open source communities and how open source software evolves. Limi profoundly ended this session in comment in which he emphasized that Plone is not the software but the community and that Plone might well run on Java in future (god forbid ;-) ) if the community decides that this is the best way forward.
If you like revolution, you would have loved Andy's talk. I certainly did! He was shooting controversial ideas into the air backed by so much real life experience and reason that it was impossible to not consider it seriously. The notions that Plone should use a relational database, that any new term or technology (like KSS) is barrier to entry and that TTW development should not be abandoned in favour of file system development, all sound radical out of context, but you can't ignore it in context. What is significant about Andy's talk is that there are people in the community that can go beyond the borders of our own technology and community and check out what other projects are doing. Alexander Limi often encourages people to attend a Drupal conference to see what they're up to, to start a dialogue and exhange ideas. Doing so shows great maturity in that we are secure enough with what we have achieved to the extent that we are open to learn from others and share with them what we have learned.
The case study panel for Plone consultants, led by Nate Aune of Jazkarta, had the principles of the most prominent Plone companies present and they all shared the stories of how they built their business on Plone and made a success of it. It was clear from this panel that nobody really had the perfect answer or strategy to running a Plone company but that we all adapt through our experience until we find a recipe that works. You might think that a group of companies that all do Plone are really competition and would be reluctant to share their secrets. The reality however is that these companies all realise that the more Plone companies there are, the bigger the market becomes. Every year at the conference, the keynote echos "Everybody is busy", emphasising just how much Plone work there is. For this reason this panel is a significant milestone in Plone's growth and we should keep having it in years to come.
I really made an effort this year to talk to as many core Plone developers as I could. They are often referred to as rock stars but they remain down to earth, and I want to thank all of them for their humility and eagerness to discuss Plone and share their knowledge.
Thank you Plone!
