Dutch Plone User Day 2011
Summary of the Dutch Plone User Day 2011.
On Tuesday 20 September 2011 the yearly Dutch Plone User Day 2011 (Dutch link) was held in De Balie in Amsterdam. This day was organized by various Dutch Plone companies. Next to good conversations during coffee and lunch the day was of course filled with presentations. Here is a short summary of those talks.
Dutch readers are encouraged to read the Dutch summary with links to larger Dutch summaries of the individual talks.
The future of Plone
Maarten Kling from Four Digits talked about "Plone Next", the future of Plone. In which exact version all changes will be available has not been decided yet.
Plone 4.1 is the most recent version. A second alpha release of Plone 4.2 is available with among other changes a better display of search results and new collections that can be managed in an easier way. Next to plans for Plone 4.3 there are more exciting plans for somewhere in the future, whether that is going to be called Plone 5 or something else: a handier interface (Deco) with more freedom for the web master; easier theming of a website; CMS UI: a bar at the top of the page with buttons for editing the page, workflow, adding content, etcetera. The rest of the week we will be working on this with several developers during the Living Statues Sprint.
SalesForce
Wieteke den Uijl from Proteon and Pierre Broekarts from Unit 4 Consist present a case study about the integration of SalesForce in Plone. Unit 4 Consist uses SalesForce as CRM system for internal usage and for marketing, sales, servicedesk, reports. In the old situation there was a lot of manual work, so errors were made. The customer also had no insight in the status of his requests.
So they had wishes: full CMS functionality and automatic input into SalesForce. Plone was chosen for this, with extra functionality for the integration with SalesForce. Customers now know where they can find everything: on this one system.
Books of reference in Plone: publishing without worries
Jan Murre from Pareto presents a case study about books of reference in Plone. KNMP publishes the Informatorium Medicamentorum, a book with thousands of large pages with medical information. We now manage this within Plone. We have built custom contenttypes, are using roles, permissions, workflow, check-out/check-in (for example you are editing the homepage and let others check your changes while the original version is still visible), a WYSIWYG-editor and full-text search. A nice overview of what is possible with Plone in this area.
Lightning talks
Following tradition the official part of the day ended with lightning talks of about five minutes.
- Paul Roeland: from Joomla to Plone. http://schonekleren.nl is currently still an old Joomla site. This will become Plone. We will use transmogrifier to migrate the content.
- Yadi Dragtsma: Free publicity. You have a nice press release but even the small local paper does not publish it. What must you do? A few redactional laws and game tips.
- Kees Hink: Diazo. For http://www.iederz.nl/ we have created a new website in Plone, with Diazo as theming method. Diazo takes pieces from the website (Plone) en places them in the html theme.
- Maurits van Rees (that's me): collective.depositbox. A small python package to store a secret key that makes actions possible, in the same way as resetting your password in Plone.
- Thijs Jonkman: Diazo. For the theming of a site with Diazo we have used the Compass style framework (with Ruby) to create some css stylesheets that work pretty well for most Plone sites, so new sites will be easier to theme.
All in all it was a nice day on which users and developers of Plone in the Netherlands have met.