Plone conference 2007, Naples. Speaker: John Lenton Company: Except

(with many thanks to Kapil Thangavelu (who helped prepare but could not give this presentation) and Chris Johnson)

Show of hands: about half of the people attending are integrators and the other half developers.

E-commerce is hard. There is astounding complexity: payment processing, shipping, discounts, taxes, etcetera. Every one of those items is essential to somebody. So if you want to please everyone you need to have all of that in your system.

Getpaid does not do that. It tries to be a minimal framework. It uses zope 3 style python packages on one side and plone content integration and UI on the other. It has no content types of its own, so you are not forced to use say GetPaidBook or GetPaidDVD because they do not exist. You can use the zope 3 adapters of getpaid on your own content types or the core Plone content types. This means it is pretty small and clean.

Getpaid is currently in production on a few sites. There is:

• Content integration (like mentioned above), you can make content items payable.
• a shopping cart
• pluggable order workflows. It uses the hurry.workflow package. It adds an adapter and parallel workflow.
• order history
• order types: shipable, donation orders. Classify and introspect orders.
• order management: you can tracks workflow changes, searching, reports, import and export.
• payment processors:
  • authorize.net: synchronous payment, for US-only merchant accounts
  • ogone.com: asynchronous, for EU-only merchant accounts probably.
  • more to come
• order payments: workflow driven. Synchronous, asynchronous, and someone wants to do offline payment to (that would be me :), ed.)
• admin interface: very simple, needs more UI love
• internationalisation and localisation. getpaid.core and PloneGetPaid are mostly i18n, for about five languages now.

5 examples of best technologies that we use:

• multistep wizard views
• using formlib and viewlets all round
• custom indexing and querying
• zope3 workflow engine (hurry.workflow) which is unbelievably simple
• doctests, event subscibers and more

Work in progress:

• We currently support any currency, but only one at the same time, so we want to do something there.
• product catalog
• UPS shipping
• Plone 3
• etc

Wishlist: pure zope 3 UI, as that is the only part that is Plone dependent now.

We have a sprint here this weekend, so join us to finish version 1.0.

Plone conference 2007, Naples. Speakers: Philipp von Weitershausen and Martin Aspeli

"I know I should write tests, but I will just let my customer or the community do that for me. They should just report bugs." Not a good idea, especially if your app only fails in some code that only gets executed by your boss. He will not be happy if it fails.

So first write a test, then start coding. That is Test Driven Development (TDD). Core developers should know that and should not need to follow this talk. :)

With TDD you catch design mistakes early on. It can keep your code simple: if the tests all pass, why would you add more code because you think you might need it in the future, complicating the code?

Tests should exercise API. Demonstrate how to use them. Other developers are happy with this kind of tested documentation. You do this with doctests. They look like a python interpreter session with some paragraphs in between. We use restructured text, so it can be turned into html and pdf and is still readable on its own.

We also have Documentation Driven Development (DDD). You write doctests first. You write a science fiction story. You tell it to an imaginary user. Just use the words "we" and "you". You can put that story on the product homepage (plone.org, PyPI). It helps you keep in mind who you are actually talking to, instead of making documentation that only you or some core developers can understand.

I've checked in the examples to my two talks in the collective:

- http://svn.plone.org/svn/collective/examples/policy-buildout/ contains the sample code for the "Extending and customising Plone 3" talk. The slides are there too, in PDF format.

- http://svn.plone.org/svn/collective/examples/example.tests/ contains boilerplate examples for the different types of tests covered in the "Untested code is broken code" talk, which I gave with Philipp von Weitershausen this morning. This may be useful as it has well-commented test setup examples. I always copy and paste this stuff between my products, so now hopefully we can keep this in one place.

Plone conference 2007, Naples. Speaker: Tom Moroz From: Open Society Institute

I hope at the end of this talk you will see that you are all part of the open society.

I am from the Open Society Institute (OSI; do not confuse this with the Open Source Initiative). We aim to shape public policy to promote democratic governance, human rights, and economic, legal, and social reform. On a local level we have several initiatives to support education and other things. We build alliances across borders.

We have national foundations is 32 countries. Founder is billionaire George Soros from Hungary. He was effected by the philosophy of Karl Popper. We have programs and give grants in over 60 countries.

As Christian Scholz and Reinout van Rees requested, I have now added technorati tags to my post and claimed my blog at technorati.com. Now my posts should show up there as well, increasing the post count especially for the Plone conference 2007 (tag: ploneconf2007). This post is actually one step in the process to claim my blog at technorati.

To make it more applicable to plone, here is some code that I added to Quills (which is the weblog product I use) so the posts get the proper technorati tags. This is code for the entry_macros.pt file.

Technorati tags:

    
      rel="tag"
      tal:content="topic/title_or_id"
      tal:attributes="href
                      string:${techbase}/${topic/getId}">
      Link to the topic
    

A lot of people here are on the Plone conference for the first time. Over the last 12 months 84 people committed code to core Plone. That is a lot. Plone is among the top two percent largest open source projects in the world.

Plone 3 has arrived! A great release with few bugs. For the details, see the talk of Jon Stahl of yesterday. Infoworld put us in spot number two a few days ago, after Alfredo.

Plone has a lot of Rock Stars, too much to list here.

A lot of smaller sites are using Plone. You cannot make the major press enthusiastic enough to talk about that though. We now have some major sites though. http://www.novell.com, http://www.cia.gov/ (they might be here at the conference but we will never know), http://discovermagazine.com/ (which is really beautiful).

We have a recent book by Martin Aspeli: Professional Plone Development. We also have Content Management with Plone: Handbook for authors and editors by Thomas Lotze and Christian Theune.

Our own website http://plone.org has gotten quite a bit of attention. It is stable, using caching (varnish). The subversion repository was moved to another server so it could not bring the site down.

What happened with the Plone Foundation. In the United States you can now donate money with tax exemption. We received about 20,000 dollars this years. We are clear about our licensing, enforcing it. We have thirty trademarks now, most importantly the name Plone. Plone Solutions also had rights to this. They graciously have changed their name to Jarn to show their commitment to the community and their support of the Plone Foundation..

On the http://plone.net/ web site we have 200 providers listed, in 44 countries, and over 800 sites listed. There is much cool information there. We can use more case studies there though (18 now), so get your information up there.

How many people here have there own Plone company? (About 80 hands showed I think). And how many of them are searching for new developers? Roughly 60 percent.

The Plone logo is very recognizable. It is a bit pale though. Jola Hyjek is working on that, making it far more readable. It still looks like the original, so that it good.

The documentation area on http://plone.org/documentation was revamped. We made new, clearer categories. Check it out. Sometimes the important thing is getting rid of 14 documents about LDAP and turning them into one really good document.

PloneSoftwareCenter was redesigned, making it much simpler. You can search for products that support Plone 3.0.

The release of Plone 3.0 has been managed by Wichert Akkerman (wiggy on irc). (Applause.) Also applause for Alec Mitchell, who is still managing Plone 2.5 and has released 2.5.4 a few days ago.

Trends. You should look at Lennert Regebro's talk about what Zope did wrong (and right). Philipp von Weitershausen will talk about Zope 3, Grok, Plone working together. Testing is improving. Let's give a round of applause to the original Zope developers. It is ten years old and still holding up very well. The ZODB is still perfect for storing objects.

Everyone is busy. There is huge demand for Plone. It makes a lot of money. A lot of other open source projects struggle there. We have to try to lower the barrier of entry though: make it easier for people to start with Plone and contribute.

We van do better with evangelism. Let people know that you are using Plone and why you are using it. When Plone 3.0 was released I encouraged people to digg it at http://digg.com and we made the top in about 12 hours. We have enough people to do things like that. Blog about it, talk about it, comment about it, link to it.

"The future is here already, it is just not evenly distributed." So what does the future hold? A lot of it is just continuation of current developments. Lots of soft issues instead of only hardcore programming. See the points about evangelism, communication. Jon Stahl: "Approachable Plone". Plone needs to be simple. Joel did a talk about Plone as a humane CMS. Hard things need to be addressed. Darci Hanning is not a coder. She works at a library and made Plone very usable for libraries. I like those stories.

Plone 3.0 was a necessary big lift. It took a lot of time. We pulled it off. Now we want to release 3.1 faster. Small, focused, 100 percent compatible with Plone 3.0. No real new things, but polishing up, making things simple, no risky changes. 3.1 should not break anything that works on 3.0. Big things will go in 4.0 (or 3.5, we will see about the version number).

A lot of people moved from Vignette to Plone. Why is that? What can we learn from other projects. Where are they cooler than us and where do they fail? I like to hear more about that. That can give us a roadmap, a vision.

Talk to other people on the conference here. Meet new friends, exchange good and bad points about Plone. Give that info to the Plone developers.

Thank you for being here (or reading this).