More info about PLOG 2012: http://www.abstract.it/abstract-en/initiative/plone-open-garden-2012/

The Plone conference 2012 will be helt in Arnhem, The Netherlands. This is a city of about 150,000 people, so everything is basically within walking distance.

There is enough space for everyone, we have several rooms available for various audience sizes. The party will also be helt there. There is food and coffee near all rooms.

Wyn Williams will setup the wireless internet. We are actually getting a new fiber connection on the conference venue.

Airports: Amsterdam (Schiphol) is at about an hour by train from Arnhem. Rotterdam and Düsseldorf are also near.

We will have two days of training, three days of conference, two days of sprints.

Most people in The Netherlands can speak English fairly well.

Rooms are available, but there are is also a big concert stadium nearby, which can lead to more people in hotels, so do book soon. If no rooms are available anymore, contact us and we are glad to help. We can also hire a large boat for this occasion where you can sleep.

If you want to do a presentation like this one on for example your local python group or university, contact us so we can help.

See http://www.ploneconf.org/

More info about PLOG 2012: http://www.abstract.it/abstract-en/initiative/plone-open-garden-2012/

See the Plone roadmap document on Google docs.

This is a draft document about the future state of Plone. There is not currently a single consensus about what direction Plone is heading in. This document contains for short and long term what the current thinking is about where Plone is headed.

We have the framework team who decides what really goes into a new version of Plone, via PLone Improvement Proposals (PLIP). This is near team. We now have a roadmap team who can have a longer range view, based also on what customers want and what would need to happen for this to work well. This gives a good idea to for example IT departments so they know if a feature is worth waiting a few months for or if it will take a few years for it to land in core Plone.

Plone is not for everybody. What is the ideal size? We used to say it is fine for a single user website and for a multi billion dollar world wide company. That may not be the best message. Plone is typically best suited for medium to large sites. Some metrics from the document:

• Complexity: Plone is usually best suited for sites with multiple content authors working on a single site. For single-author sites, Plone is often considered too complex. Multi-site CMS installations, where content is shared between several distinct websites, can be built with Plone, but is not supported out of the box.
• Duration: Plone projects typically require some ramp-up and initial planning. This means the duration of Plone projects is usually measured in weeks and months, not days. Anecdotal evidence suggests a typical project is 2-6 months long.
• Cost: Costs vary greatly across geographies and organisations, but it is fair to say that most Plone projects involve a meaningful investment of resources (money, staff, time).

Plone has a few differentiators, like these:

• Plone is entirely built by a community, which is fairly unique for CMS platforms that Plone is usually compared with.
• Good security track record. It is easier for us at Netsight to patch one hundred Plone sites than one Wordpress site; and you need to patch Wordpress a lot more often.
• With Plone 4.2 easier theming will come into the core with Diazo.

We used to say at some point that Plone 4 was going to be evolutionary and Plone 5 revolutionary. But people have been wanting to try the new technologies earlier. Still, Plone 5 might break some backwards compatibility. Trickling some of the Plone 5 technologies into Plone 4 already, may make the upgrade easier.

We are using more outside technologies. For example, instead of Kupu (which was maintained by Plone) we now use TinyMCE (which is maintained outside of Plone).

In the medium term, Plone will separate the user interface from the editing interface, using plone.app.cmsui. Plone will use Chameleon as template engine; there might be incompatibility with some add-ons, but core Plone already works fine with it, using its normal zope pagetemplates. Add five.pt to your eggs now and check if your add-ons keep working; fix them when they do not work.

In the long term we will probably get rid of the Zope Management Interface. Plone is the only major user of Zope 2, so let's make Zope 2 (or Zope 4, or whatever it will be called) what we want it to be. We have several own versions of control panels in the Site Setup already of course.

Have a look at the Plone roadmap document yourself: http://bit.ly/roadmapplone. Note that this is still a draft. Add comments! Get your thoughts in sooner, rather than later.

More info about PLOG 2012: http://www.abstract.it/abstract-en/initiative/plone-open-garden-2012/

What features does Plone have?

• web based
• familiar folder structure
• in-site editing, no need to have a preview separated from the back-end editing
• role or group based access control, or nested
• customizable, local workflow
• versioning, check-in/check-out
• ZODB versions: undo
• search: full text and live search
• navigation: orderable items, readable urls
• SEO optimization
• HTML filtering
• Pluggable authentication
• strong commercial eco system
• strong add-on eco system
• flexible theming, skinning, templating; you can theme basically anything; getting easier; also some standard themes now
• commenting
• accessibility; a task force to have a new look at this may be formed
• multilingual; UI (and content with an add-on)
• GPL, open source, no license costs
• Plone Foundation as copyright holder so not a single company; multi-vendor
• works on multiple platforms
• python
• good security track record
• persistent urls that stay valid
• caching support
• clustering (ZEO)
• RelStorage (Oracle, Postgres, MySQL as backend)
• cutting and pasting folders and documents
• WYSIWYG editor
• metadata, Dublin core
• content types
• COPE, multichannel
• mobile ready
• html5 ready
• personal dashboard
• WebDAV, ftp access, XML-RPC
• built-in RSS indication
• any search can be turned into an RSS feed
• collections (document sets)
• tagging, taxonomy
• PDF generation (with add-ons)
• portlets
• customizable layout
• event logs
• buildout
• content rules engine
• mailing system
• blogging
• content management
• image scaling/handling
• inline view for (some) files you upload
• getting faster with each release
• sub sites
• create your own forms (add-on PloneFormGen)
• geo tagging
• document indexing, full text pdf search
• possible external search integration, e.g. SOLR
• documentation
• (community) support
• local user groups and events
• complete application stack
• cross-browser compatibility
• automated tests, continuous testing
• there is an upgrade path to newer versions
• framework team who reviews new ideas for the core
• good release management
• modular packaging
• mature
• you can migrate to Plone from several other platforms, there is a basis for that
• translated into dozens of languages out of the box
• external integration
• community events, conferences, code sprints, Plone Tune-Ups
• code quality
• extensible content types through the web (dexterity)
• turn a folder into a photo gallery
• out of the box product plus platform
• personalization, user profiles, user folder
• contextual search: search within a folder
• ratings, twitter, facebook (with add-ons)

If you are interesting in improving this list, structuring it, contact Matt Hamilton for access to a Google Docs document where we can collaboratively edit it.

More info about PLOG 2012: http://www.abstract.it/abstract-en/initiative/plone-open-garden-2012/

Goal: multilingual gateway to Plone for decision makers, managers, recommenders, press. Feature list. Mostly not software. Super cached for outstanding performance. Experience should be very user-focused.

Messages: Plone is active, pervasive, actively getting better, open source done right. Focus points: quality, security, testing, ease of use by content managers.

See idealware.org report Comparing Open Source CMSs: WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, and Plone: http://www.netsight.co.uk/blog/open-source-content-management-systems-a-tale-of-two-reports

We have ideas for the basic site structure.

What is of interest to a developer may not be interesting for an end user or decision maker. On plone.org as non-technical user you are lost. We should ask feedback from end users.

When a client of Abstract picked Plone, they still missed something like plone.com to explain to some of the decision makers what Plone actually is, compared to in this case Joomla.

For new developers it would help to have a document explaining Plone for Joomla developers or Wordpress developers, using their terms, their vocabulary, comparing technologies.

Gartner would not investigate Plone, because Plone is not a company.

More info about PLOG 2012: http://www.abstract.it/abstract-en/initiative/plone-open-garden-2012/