Timo Stollenwerk: State of Plone
Keynote at Plone Conference 2026 in Maastricht.
I spent three days and nights working on my first website. Maybe I slept a few hours. What drove me, was enthusiasm, curiosity about a new technology. This still drives us today as Plone community.
Dunning-Kruger effect: the less you know about a topic, the more confident you feel. Afterwards you go all the way down, see the mess you made, and you think how am I going to maintain this? You see that when you keep it up.
Fast forward to 2026: Artificial Intelligence. You can build a small website in even a few minutes. Or a few hours if you want it more fancy. At first you feel on top of the world: this way I don't even have to work anymore.
But you still go all the way down. AI takes you part of the way, but you are not done. This is the same cycle as for my first website, but faster: the first 80 percent is very fast, but taking it all the way takes much longer.
It is a fundamental change. The speed is higher. Eliza is a program written in the 1960s, pretending to be human, in 420 lines of code. It pretty much turned anything you told it into a question back at you. The Eliza effect: people perceive intelligence, even when it is not really there.
Good news: the technology is not rocket science. We have open source LLMs. This gives digital sovereignty. Using AI is not that hard. More important is governance and trust between people. In the Plone community we have built trust between each other over the past 25 years. This prepares us for a wave of AI slop, better than most open source communities. We have dealt with this already a few years ago when a wave of enthusiastic potential Google Summer of Code students began sending in large AI-generated pull requests.
Short version: don't be a meat proxy, just passing an answer from AI to another person. This erodes trust and human relationships.
Be transparent: show how you got some answer. Read the answer that AI gave you before sending it on, and validate it. If you send it on, you take over responsibility.
- Q: "Can you build me a website in five minutes?"
- A: "Yes, but I won't take responsibility for it."
Licensing and attribution. Open source models are catching up with training material, but the top ones are from the US or China, and they don't care much about the legal effects.
What does AI meant for my website and CMS? 30-50 percent of your website visitors might be AI. Cloudflare reports 33.9 percent bots in the past 6 months of world traffic that they see. You still have search engine bots of course, now also AI bots and AI agents.
What do those bots want? They want your content. Plone is a Content Management System, so we have everything that they need. We have semantic HTML, sitemaps, REST API.
In Plone 6.3 (mid 2027) we are preparing enhancements.
- A guide for AT bots:
llms.txt. This can be pointers to main content or to REST API endpoints. - Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Ask AI anything and let it generate answers. So we need to think about REST API and content negotiation. REST API allows you to get json or html, but what is missing is markdown. We want to add this.
Within the Plone community we have the PLIP process: PLone Improvement Proposal. You can propose an improvement. We will first discuss if this could be something to do in an add-on, or in Plone core. For example standardize AI endpoints, PLIP 4235.
Bring your own agent: Model Context Protocol Server, PLIP 4213. I did not try agentic AI yet, where an agent does things on its own, and connect all systems. I am not brave enough for this, and don't want to give a company all my data.
We have other features in the pipeline for 6.3, apart from AI.
Plone 7 will be faster. Reduce the bundle size, improved editor experience, reuse components between Volto and Blicca, accessibility for editors. This year we have seven sprints, in which we speed up development of Plone.
Plone 7 will be innovation. See talk by Victor and Piero: State of Plone Volto and Aurora. Maurits will hold the state of Plone backend. There are six talks about Blicca (ClassicUI) during the conference, I am happy about the traction there. Three talks about Nick (alternative backend in NodeJS).