Mari: Social skills in Finland

Today's lesson: use of personal space. An internet meme is that Finnish people need a lot of personal space. There have been actual academic studies around this: it is actually a thing! You have high contact cultures and low-contact cultures. Finland has 16 people per square kilometer, India has over 400.

Herman Melville: "We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow-men."

If a Fin steps back from you in conversation, do not see it as an insult, just a different culture.

Plone Sponsorships

First: if you have not voted for the Plone Foundation Board elections, do so, if you are a member.

There have been a lot of sprints today. And these are the things where most of the money of the foundation goes to. So sponsoring Plone is important. See https://plone.org/foundation/sponsorship

We have drafted a new sponsorship program, and hope to start with it soon. We will contact all current sponsors.

Thomas Lambert: How to integrate +100 different themes

SmartWeb is a Plone application to help municipalities in Belgium to manage their website. By now more than 100 websites in production. Each website has its own layout/theme. Our graphic designer creates a Figma layout, together with the municipality. We use Barceloneta inside a base theme. Then pnpm with some custom CSS for each site.

Maurits van Rees: SFIA skills framework

SFIA is the global skills and competency framework for the digital world. See https://sfia-online.org/ This is a client of Zest Software, and I work for them via my own company Py76. A few days ago I found out that they recently started sponsoring Plone, so that is nice, and I thought I would present their website here. It is a Plone 6.1 Classic UI site, using Mosaic.

The SFIA framework defines skills on levels between 1 and 7. An organisation can use this to see where a team is missing skills. Maybe a team needs someone with a Programming/software development skill at level 4. You can use the text on this site as basis for a job offering. Or you see that the team already has someone with this skill on a lower level, and they could grow with some training. As individual you can look at which skills you have and at which level you are using it. You can look what the responsibilities and expectations are on the next higher level. Or find a list of related skills that may be interesting for you.

The stack is: CloudFlare, Apache, Varnish, 2 zeo clients, a zeo server. We only very recently added Varnish. It seemed fine enough without it, and we had CloudFlare. But by default CloudFlare basically only caches CSS, JS, images. No html, unless you configure it differently. And then AI bots started querying the site, causing slow responses. So we added Varnish and this helped.

It is a multilingual site, translated into 13 languages. Does anyone here have more languages in a site? No.

But how do you edit a Japanese page as editor if you can’t read Japanese? CodeSyntax has made an add-on for this: cs.adminlanguage. This is only active when you are logged in as Editor. Messages in the plone domain are not translated, so important parts of the UI are in English.

Every three years they release a new version of their skills framework. This is prepared in English. Then we export this as XML. This gets uploaded to an external service where it gets translated in the other languages, partially by human translators, but AI or translation memories are getting a larger role. Then we import it and create the new content in Plone.

There is also a control panel to create an html export. You select an image, a title, optional extra css, and select the content to export and the language. Then you click the button to generate the html. And more importantly you can generate a PDF. This uses the same HTML, and transforms it with Prince, which is installed on the server.

They are nice people to work with, so thank you Peter, Ian, and Lucy!

Rob Gietema: New Volto form block

The current form block uses custom widgets. Would be nicer to reuse existing ones. Reuse the backend with some minor changes. Provided wrappers with the logic that is needed for the form, so you can use "dumb" custom widgets where needed. You can specify a custom form component.

Piero Nicolli: 42

If you want to use the under development Seven project today, you can, but you currently need to use Volto for the editing. So I made a package in the collective on the name fortytwo (Seven times Plone 6).

Antoine Duchene: Document generation in Plone 6

Some metrics: we produce around 110 thousand documents per month across all our business apps. Roughly 2500 templates in the wild. The engine is the Appy framework, relying on LibreOffice. We made collective.documentgenerator. Version 4 works on Plone 6 (Classic UI). Already used in production at iMio. Manageable LibreOffice templates TTW with specific content types.

Luna: Website builder distribution

Based on Volto. Demo.

Johannes Raggam: bssp

We will have another Buschenschanksprint (bssp) in 2026. This is in Austria. Topic of course Plone, Classic UI, Volto, but you can bring your own topics. I organise apartments so people can sleep there. You can of course book your own if you want a more private sphere. The Buschenschank is a traditional restaurant with cold plates with cheese and sausage and such.

Tuesday 26 to Sunday 31 May 2026. You can already register.

Philip Bauer: Is it awesome?

You have probably created awesome add-ons. But have you "awesomed" it? Register it in our awesome lists:

• For Plone backend / Classic UI: https://github.com/collective/awesome-plone
• For Volto: https://github.com/collective/awesome-volto