Highlights from Plone Conference (Vienna, September 2005)

We had an opportunity this year to attend the Vienna Plone conference.

Much to report, but here are some highlights:

Zope 3

Zope 3 and CMF technologies are coming along - Plone needs to start leveraging both of these (e.g. Zope 3 Views, stronger collaboration with CMF team and working to push more of Plone technology into CMF). The Goldegg project ("The promise of Zope 3 in the practice of Plone") offers funding and resources to help make this happen. Zope Five provides ease of using Zope 3 technologies while still running Zope 2.x. There are also two related projects: Five on Archetypes (FATE) and Five with Plone (FLON).
- Philipp von Weitershausen provided a nice hands-on "Plone and Five Tutorial" that helps you understand how to start using Zope 3 technologies with Plone. This is now here.
- San Jose Sprint II: Packaging and Products (November 7-11, 2005) Details

Zope 3.1 has a simplified component architecture, more flexible security, ZCML simplifications since Zope 3.0 (more being done in Python code), nice API documentation built-in, catalog based on TextIndexNG.
Zope 3 now using time-based releases of new versions - June 1st and December 1st (with feature-freeze a month before). Zope 2.9 will include Zope 3.2 (via Five). Zope 3.2 will likely include a product packaging system, blob support via ZODB 3.6, new server architecture using Twisted instead of ZServer, publisher changes, better XML support, moving UI definition from ZCML into Python and formlib is pythonic way to create forms (requiring Python 2.4). WebDAV needs to be finished.
Zope 3 Tools for Through-the-Web (TTW) programming haven't had much progress, but seen as useful for non-programmers to work with Zope. Also, Zope 3 supposedly has a Bobo Branch that is a scaled down version of Zope for certain applications which makes entry to the platform easier (which is a benefit of Ruby on Rails for instance).

Plone 2.1 has been released and has many benefits - speed, scalability, and features such as ATCT, Smart Folders, Display Menu, Right-to-Left language support, ExtendedPathIndex (uses catalog to more quickly generate listings, site map, nav trees), Resource Registry (conditional CSS). A new "Framework Team" has been formed by Alan Runyan to manage the process of PLIPs. Alan Runyan and Alexander Limi's presentation has various quotes - my favorite was "Plone - It breaks so you don't have to".

Several presentations covered AJAX technologies, including "Using Mozilla/XUL with Plone", and "Fluid - Plone Application with AJAX functionality".
AlphaFlow appears to be a promising and powerful workflow engine for Plone 2.x. Features include ability to provide a separate workflow on each object, parallel workflows and is activity based. Why not use the other workflow engines? Default DCWorkflow is stable but not a lot of features; OpenFlow project apparently is stale.
Strong Web Authentication with Python and OpenSSL (presented by pilotsystems.net) - A common question is how to secure Plone logins. The system presented here was very solid, but not something you'd likely use for your standard Plone site, since it does require a more complex setup (HTTP reverse proxy, authentication database, openssl), plus currently relies on a client-side Java applet that only runs on Windows' browsers (though a Java applet expert could likely solve this fairly quickly).
Lightening Talks: PloneBoard (presented by me), Selenium/Zelenium, BLOB support in ZODB / reading an MS Access database (presented separately by gocept.com), MountFolder product, Multimedia in Plone (plone4artists.org, presented by jazkarta.com), Open Courseware and Plone

The new 2005 board has been choosen - board members are those that have provided significant and enduring contributions to Plone. Current projects including Plone Marketing, protection of Plone trademarks and intellectual property conservancy. There is now a Plone Media Kit. Plone Foundation Website

Volunteers needed to assist the foundation, as well as work on plone.org website (i.e. content librarians, system admins, graphic designers).

There were many great talks - some I couldn't attend or didn't report on above - check out the full list. Also, here's the Plone Conference website.

The conference blog is located here.
Websites and photos are also available via tags at http://del.icio.us/tag/plonecon2005 and Flickr at http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/ploneconf2005/ (note: it seems a slightly different tag was generally adopted for Flickr, but some pictures do use the official tag of plonecon2005).

Didn't have a chance to attend the Sprints in the days following the conference, and also didn't have a chance to explore some of the wonderful museums and sites of Vienna.