Today is the World Plone Day and I am attending the regional event in Bonn, Germany to show my support, to meet new people interested in Plone and catching up with the usual suspects regional community. Every year on the 28th of April, informational events about the Plone CMS are held around the world.

What is Plone?

Plone is a free and open source content management system built on top of the Zope application server. Plone can be used for in principle any kind of website, including blogs, internet sites, webshops and internal websites. It is also well positioned to be used as a document publishing system and groupware collaboration tool. The strengths of Plone are its flexible and adaptable workflow, very good security, extensibility, high usability and flexibility. -Wikipedia

What is the goal of the World Plone Day?

The World Plone Day (WPD) is a worldwide event. Our goal is to promote and educate the worldwide public about of the benefits of using Plone in education, government, ngos, and in business. -World Plone Day FAQ

So far today at the WPD in Bonn Jan Ulrich Hasecke from hasecke.com and DZUG held a great introduction to Plone. You can download the slides here. (Currently only available as PDF due to image license issues. The presentation should be up on Slideshare shortly.) and you can read his (German) Whitepaper on Plone here (be sure to set your browser language to DE).

Here’s some snippets of his presentation as streamed live on USTREAM (sorry for the low quality; It’s live from my iPhone):

You can also follow my sporadic live USTREAM here: http://ustre.am/aQ8

(Non-Flash version of the image slideshow)

I’d like to offer all the participants a big THANK YOU! Looking forwards to be seeing you guys either in Sorento and/or Bristol. You rock! Seriously.

The official German DZUG press release describes the results of the sprint quite well, so I thought I’d be a lazy bastard attach my crude translation below. Feel free to quote it, reuse and repost it as you may see fit.

PRESS RELEASE

DZUG e.V. (German speaking Zope User Group)

Forsterstr. 29 ∙ 06112 Halle (Saale)

Visuals: http://www.flickr.com/photos/12317756@N08/4448944324/

Official hash tag: #cathedralsprint

The Plone Cathedral Sprint 2010 in Cologne comes to a successful end

Over 25 Python developers from Europe, North and South America gathered at the GfU Cyrus AG educational institute in Cologne, Germany (http://www.gfu.net) to collectively push the development of the Plone Content Management System (CMS) forwards. As another Plone sprint, the Tahoe Snow Sprint (http://plone.org/events/community/tahoe-snow-sprint-2010 http://www.coactivate.org/projects/tahoe-snow-sprint-2010/project-home),  was being held at the same time in Tahoe, USA the developers utilized video conferencing and the differences in time zones to work on certain topics around the clock.

The sprint in Cologne was highly productive. During the sprint, the Plone 4 release manager Eric Steele even published a couple of screen casts where you could follow the progress and the results:  http://blip.tv/posts/?topic_name=cathedralsprint

More usability

The Plone Cathedral Sprint was dedicated to further improve and enhance the user experience. The search results from the native Plone search engine now return more information about the found article, making it easier for the user to find the right one. Additionally, the search results can now be further narrowed down by applying further various criteria incrementally.

The configuration of collections is also more intuitive and faster than ever before. Collections are saved search requests that show the search results as if the returned content would be located in the same area, or folder if you will, of a website. Creating extremely flexible websites is made simple by using collections and their numerous search criteria. The new collections user interface enables Webmasters to change and modify the settings faster than ever.

Commenting in Plone was extended to include moderation and captchas, thus enabling anonymous commenting in Plone out of the box.

The Plone event calendar was also enhanced to enable standard management of all-day and recurring events.

Starter help for German speaking users

Plone supports around 50 languages and is thus deployable worldwide. The numerous new functionalities of Plone 4 and the according changes to the user interface were translated to German and Dutch during the sprint. The helful links that now appear on a standard start page should be Of particular interest to German speaking users. This start page is automatically generated when creating a new Plone site. You’ll now find links to sources of information in German on the page like the Plone developer handbook and the German mailing list in addition to the documentation in English.

Sprints as culture

Sprints are a distinctiveness of the Plone, Zope and Python development culture. The list of successful and legendary sprints held all around the world is long. Traditionally, developers come together at the location of a developer community alternately and on a rotational basis to exchange ideas and work intensely focused on predefined tasks and goals. The Cologne Cathedral Sprint 2010 will probably be remembered in the Plone community for delivering results for quite a while.

About Plone

With its around 200 core developers, Plone is one of the largest Open Source projects in existence. The user friendly CMS is characterized by its workflow support, accessibility, scalability, expandability and high security.

Plone supports about 50 languages and runs on all common operating systems. Plone is Open Source software licensed under the GNU Public License (GPL).

http://plone.org/about

About the Plone Foundation

The Plone Foundation is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that was formed in May 2004 with the Apache Software Foundation as a role model. The foundation is the copyright holder of the Plone source code and the Plone trade mark. It is located in Houston, TX USA and is officially represents the developer community worldwide.

With around 200 core developers and 570 developers of Plone products the Plone community is one of the largest and most vibrant Open Source developer communities worldwide.

http://plone.org/about/foundation

About the DZUG e.V.

The DZUG e.V. considers itself the representative for the German speaking Zope users in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. It seeks to better connect the interests of users and developers to enable a more efficient pooling of resources within the ever fast expanding Open Source community. The organization especially initiates projects that support spreading Zope within the German speaking world, like translation and documentation of software components and organizing training and informative events.

DZUG e.V. Deutschsprachige Zope User Group

Forsterstr. 29

06112 Halle (Saale)

Phone +49 (0) 345 122 9889 9

Fax +49 (0) 345 122 9889 1

E-Mail email@dzug.org

Press contact:

Jan Ulrich Hasecke

E-Mail juh@dzug.org

Phone +49 (0) 212 2331483

Yours sincerely,

Jan Ulrich Hasecke

This week I’m attending the first Plone Sprint held in my hometown of Cologne! The aim of the sprint is to focus on completing tasks for the upcoming major release of version 4.0 and even the next incremental version 4.1.

I’m working on the sprint group that is trying to clean up the search interface and make the Plone search experience a little bit better.  I think we’re making some progress already – and as always – it’s great fun! :)

It’s now official where and when the Plone Conference 2008 will be held. The winner is Washington DC and the dates are October 8 – 10 preceded by two days of Plone training sessions, and followed by 2-3 days of sprinting.

Congratulations to Alex Clark and the ZPUGDC!

I’d like to openly disclose that I voted for the DC proposal, although it would have been more convenient for me personally to attend a conference in Europe. My vote this year was for a change of continent.

I hope I will be able to attend and see you there!

[tags]plone, ploneConf2008, conference, Washington DC, Washington, DC, CMS, open source, community, development, dev, sprint, ZPUGDC, Alex Clark[/tags]

Today I was inspired by a comment left by Alexander on my last post about Plone icons in Media Wiki.

I had totally forgot that also other elements of the original Plone icon set have spread like wildfire all over them there internets. For instance this ‘Print’ icon:

Chances are that you have already seen this icon somewhere on the web or in an application. I can remember even spotting it in the classic slsk (Soulseek) p2p client.

‘So, what’s the competition?’ I hear you murmur. Well, send me all your weirdest spottings of the Plone Print (printer) icon in the wild by Saturday the 22nd of March, and I’ll draw a winner that will receive an American Apparel T-shirt (in the size of their choosing) with signed version of the original Printer artwork on it.

Happy hunting!

[tags]plone, cms, icon, icons, slsk, soulseek, competition, americanapparel, t-shirt, vidarandersen, blacktar, print, printer[/tags]

If you happen to visit Wikipedia or Wikileaks from time to time, chances are you’ve seen this faceless person sitting on top of the page staring down at you:

However, chances are that you’ve probably never really asked yourself where it comes from. Then again, who in their right mind would?

Closeup:

Funny thing is icon, among others on Wikipedia, is actually from the original icon set of the Plone CMS. Media Wiki later as a true testament to the amazing work of the Plone CSS developer community, shall we say ‘borrowed’ the Plone CSS – and the icons. Then Wikipedia and Wikileaks made use of Media Wiki and the rest is – as they say – history. So now you know.

Funny thing for me is, I actually made this and the original Plone icon set. ;)

Please leave a comment if you have seen other Plone icons in the wild.

It’s over a week since the Plone Conference 2007 in Naples, Italy but I’ll try to wrap up my highlights from the third and last day regardless of the lag.

At the socializing dinner on the evening of the second day I had the unexpected fortune of finding myself seated at a table next to Roberto Allende from Menttes and Plone Cono Sur. He seemed like an interesting guy, so I decided to check out his speak “Plone Cono Sur: creating a Plone users group from scratch” on the following day.

Long story short: That speak really made my day. It was both funny and highly motivating. Watch it for yourself:

So as soon as I got back to Cologne I got in touch with the local Zope and Python User Groups with the goal of contributing as much as I can. Let’s hope we’ll have A PZP (Python Zope Plone) User Group in the region soon.

Lastly I’d like to thank Luiciano Ramalho for the neat t-shirt. I’ve never “slept” with a Brazilian before. It was, uh… special. ;)

[tags]plone, ploneconf2007, conference, speak, motivational, rheinland, cologne, usergroup, rzug, dzug, zope, python, conosur, menttes, Roberto Allende, Luiciano Ramalho[/tags]

If there was a general theme to take home at the Plone Conference 2007 in Naples, Italy on the second day of the conference – beside from Plone now being officially trademarked – it has to be that “Plone is a Product” and “Plone is Democracy”.

Now everybody repeat after me… No, seriously – all together now! :)

I think “Plone is a Product” is a very important statement. It really helps to explain that “Plone is not technology” and it’s a helpful ‘tool’ to position and ‘sell’ Plone, both for the community and people new to Plone.

“Plone is Democracy” tells a powerful story with only three words. Plone is open for anyone who wishes to participate. Plone is you.

[tags] plone, ploneconf2007, conference, naples, italy, community, software, people, social, mantra, positioning, marketing, branding, trademark[/tags]

It’s now the 11th of October and the second day of the conference so I’m sort of lagging, but here are my impressions from yesterday.

The next best thing I took home with me on the first day of the Plone Conference 2007 in Naples, Italy – after meeting a lot of dear new and old faces – was attending the “Top Ten Ways to Get Involved with the Plone Community” speech by Darci Hanning (Scott Paley has an excellent writeup on his blog) and the “How to market Plone the Web2.0 way” by Christian “MrTopf” Scholz.

The Plone community is amazing. It is Plone. That said, we can be somewhat insular. A lot of the time we are preaching to the already converted. I think we are all aware of that. However, we’d all like to see Plone spreading even further and bring more converts into the fold.

What I loved about Darci’s talk was the numerous points on how people who are not software developers can get involved in the community and make great and important contributions, really driving home point that the community is not just for code centric people. I think they serve as great motivational arguments to engage and motivate more people from the “outside” to join the Plone community.

I think Christian’s points about reaching outside of the community and spreading the word of Plone using web2.0 and social media was a healthy dose of long due common sense and I hope it will inspire more members of the Plone community to network on social networks, blog, screencast and podcast more about Plone. He’s also streaming talks at the conference.

| View | Upload your own

You can find the some presentations held at Plone Conf 2007 on openplans.org

More images from me will be up on flickr later today. In the meantime you can see what others have already uploaded on flickr by searching for the official tag ploneconf2007.

[tags]plone, Christian Scholz, mrtopf, Darci Hanning, Scott Paley, ploneconf2007, conference, naples, italy, community, software, people, social, blacktar, Vidar Andersen, openplans[/tags]