Welcome to the Netsight Developer Blog.

Here you'll find articles written by our developers and general everyday chat about what is going on. Many of these articles are technical in nature and intended for fellow software developers, and those interested in how we go about building our websites.

Zope Page Templates in Google App Engine

written by Daniel Marks, on Feb 4, 2010 9:50:00 AM.

At EuroPython last year, Matt Hamilton gave a talk on using Zope Page Templates (ZPT) outside of Zope. ZPT uses the Template Attribute Language (TAL) to create dynamic templates that you can use in your own web applications, reporting frameworks, documentation systems or any other project.

Why TAL?

The point of this post isn't to go into detail about why you should use ZPT/TAL. Suffice to say that TAL:

Makes well-formed XHTML easy
Ensures that you close all elements and quote attributes
Escapes all ampersands by default & -> &

The Django Templating Language:

<ul>
  {% for name in row %} 
    <li>{{name}}</li>
  {% endfor %}
</ul>

TAL:

<ul>
  <li tal:repeat="name row"
      tal:content="name">
    Dummy data
  </li>
</ul>

Using ZPT in your own project

There are three steps to using ZPT in your own project.

Install ZPT (via the zope.pagetemplate package and its dependencies)
Create a template file
Render the template file using the data from your application

Install zope.pagetemplate

I recommend using virtualenv for each new application.

# virtualenv zptdemo
# cd zptdemo
# bin/easy_install zope.pagetemplate

Create a template

mytemplate.pt

<html> 
  <body> 
    <h1>Hello World</h1>
    <div tal:condition="python:foo == 'bar'">
      <ul>
        <li tal:repeat="item rows" tal:content="item" /> 
      </ul> 
    </div>
  </body>
</html>

Render the template

mycode.py

from zope.pagetemplate.pagetemplatefile \
    import PageTemplateFile

my_pt = PageTemplateFile('mytemplate.pt')
context = {'rows': ['apple', 'banana', 'carrot'], 
           'foo':'bar'}
print my_pt.pt_render(namespace=context)

And that's it. This will generate the following:

Hello World

apple
banana
carrot

Google App Engine

This is all very well if you're able to install your own packages, but Google App Engine (GAE) doesn't allow you to do this. You can, however, include packages with your application, which is what we'll do here. When installing zope.pagetemplate into your virtual environment, you may have noticed that the following packages were installed:

zope.pagetemplate
zope.i18nmessageid
zope.interface
zope.tal
zope.tales

We can extract all these files and put them into our GAE application.

I've already done this for you, and you can grab a copy of the 'zope' folder on GitHub here. Put this folder into the top level of your application.

Create a template as described above, and then place the Python code that renders the template into your application's RequestHandler. It should end up looking something like this:

class MainHandler(webapp.RequestHandler):

  def get(self):
    my_pt = PageTemplateFile('main.pt') 
    context = {'rows': ['apple', 'banana', 'carrot'], 
               'foo':'bar'}
    self.response.out.write(my_pt.pt_render(namespace=context))

At this point you have ZPT working in GAE and you can take advantage of all the features that ZPT and TAL provide.

The application on GitHub can be download, tested and even deployed straight to Google App Engine without modification. You can see an example of it running here.

update: it's also possible to use Chameleon on Google App Engine, which as Martin says may be easier and faster.

Plone Conference 2010 in Bristol, UK

written by Matt Hamilton, on Jan 26, 2010 5:24:00 PM.

Well, we've finally done it! For a number of years now at Plone conferences around the world, I've said "Wouldn't it be great to hold the Plone Conference in the UK?' and each successive year I seem to say it after fewer and fewer beers. This year, we've finally done something about it, and put a bid in to host the Plone Conference 2010 in the UK. Not only that, but the bid was accepted :)

So now comes the hard work, in terms of planning the whole event. I think if we get things started nice and early then we should be OK. So far I've been in touch with a number of previous Plone Conference organisers and got quite a good deal of feedback from them on things that worked or didn't work from their point of view with the management and running of the conference. Having been to every conference except the first one myself, I've got a pretty good idea of what makes them work from a delegates point of view (decent wifi and lots of coffee! ;) ).

Bristol's Biggest Bike Ride - credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pshab/

Bristol's Biggest Bike Ride. Bristol is the UK's first 'Cycle City' and is known for its work on environmental issues. This photo is taken in front of @Bristol, a science museum. The big silver dome is the planetarium. Those that came to the Performance Sprint in Bristol might recognise it, as was just around the corner from the sprint venue.

Bristol is a fantastic city, located in the South West of the UK with a population of around 600,000 people. Despite its modest size, it has a very high regard with technology and media. The BBC Natural History unit is here, and a lot of BBC Dramas filmed in the city, and around this spawned a whole ecosystem of related media businesses such as post-production, graphics, audio, costume, etc. When the term 'New Media' started to surface in the early 90's Bristol was hot on the scene and as a result a large number of digital / interactive agencies formed. Bristol is also home to Aardman Animations, the creators of Morph, Wallace and Gromit, Shaun the Sheep and other well known plastercine characters. Bristol is also referred to as the 'Silicon Valley of the UK' with a whole host of silicon chip manufacturers and related businesses here.

Bristol Cathedral (foreground) and Bristol University (behind) - credit nicksarebi http://www.flickr.com/photos/34517490@N00

Bristol Cathedral in the foreground and the Wills Memorial Building, part of the University of Bristol in the Background. The University received its charter in 1909, and is now one of two universities in the city -- the other being the University of West England. This building was built between 1912-1925 and considered one of the last great Gothic buildings to be built in the UK.

I came to Bristol in 1996 to attend the University of Bristol to read Computer Science, and graduated four years later to form Netsight, based just over the road. in the next 10 years, Netsight has grown to 13 staff and become well known within the Plone community for our advocacy work, and promotion of Plone.

Each year, the Plone Conference gets better and better, so I'm under no doubt that I have some pretty high expectations to meet. Last year I was leading the programme committee for the Budapest conference and we had an amazing number of talk submissions, way more than we had room to fill and we had a tough choice picking the talks. This year I want to get direct feedback from the community and get the talks organised earlier and get them all up online so the whole community can see them and vote on the talks they would most like to see. That way we can be as transparent as possible, but also make sure that we give a chance to those potential delegates that are not yet so involved with the Plone community to have a vote in which talks they want to see. It is always hard to make sure we get a good balance of talks for those new to Plone and those with lots of experience. It will also give us a chance to gauge the talk popularity beforehand and schedule the talks in the appropriately sized rooms.

Speaking of rooms, yes we do have a venue already in mind. We are talking to more than one and just negotiating the final details with them before we make it concrete and announce the venue.

One item you might have seen on the preliminary conference page is the one-day 'Analysts / Customers / Suits' mini-conference. The goal of this day is to attract those people whom we might not normally reach so easily as a (generally developer-focused) community. For this I'm talking about industry analysts and pundits, journalists, technology evaluators, customers, etc. I don't mean to be glib when I say 'suits' but hopefully most people will get what I mean. The main conference has always historically been very inward focussed as a community. Events like World Plone Day have shown the value of reaching out to a wider audience and I see the conference as an ideal time to organise something. This was if someone wants to they can come to the one-day conference and stay for the main conference as well. For the one-day event I'm hoping to invite a number of speakers to come and present case studies of Plone projects they have been involved in.

I'm open to ideas as well for all aspects of the conference. If you have any particular ideas you'd like to see, or want to get involved in the conference then by all means drop me an email on ploneconf2010@netsight.co.uk. I'm going to me asking around the community for volunteers (esp. from the other UK Plone companies) as well closer to the time.

-Matt

Plone 4 Speed in Real Life

written by Matt Hamilton, on Jan 19, 2010 9:19:00 AM.

Having just seen Hanno's blog post on how much faster Plone 4 is, I thought I'd give it a test myself. Whilst Hanno did a test on a simple 'default' site in which he removed most of the portlets and the likes, I thought I'd try it out on a 'real' site and see what sort of performance gains I get.

The site I chose was a site we designed called Kent Rural Network. This is a very simple site, so I thought a good one to try as it doesn't have such vast amounts of customisation that it would render such comparative tests moot. Plone has always been able to go fast if you've known what knobs to tweak, the news here is how much faster is out of the box, without needing to enable any caching, clustering or tuning.

Kent Rural Network Site

The Kent Rural Networks site is written on Plone 3 (was developed on Plone 3.1) and has a very simple skin applied, yet retains much of Plone's out of the box features such as news items, events and a number of simple custom content types created in Archetypes. This is the kind of site that could be developed taking Plone out of the box and spending a a few days creating a theme and some content types for it.

The tests were carried out on my Macbook Air (1.6Ghz Core 2 Duo Processor). The absolute values are not that important as every server will give different results, the main thing here is the ratio of performance of the newer versions of Plone.

Plone 4 Performance

As you can see, the upgrade to Plone 4 brings a pretty significant performance boost, the same as Hanno's figures show. You get almost double the performance accessing the homepage of the site. I also tried testing it with Chameleon installed (the new template rendering engine in Plone trunk) which gave a speedup of over 2.5 times!

As an aside: the upgrade process from Plone 3.3 to Plone 4 on this site was pretty painless. There were some tweaks that needed to be made, mainly in templates we had customised and were referring to methods that are no longer global in Plone4. An example is the toLocalizedTime() method which used to be global, but now you need to add

<tal:define="toLocalizedTime nocall: context/@@plone/toLocalizedTime;">

in order to bring it into scope.

Definitely the easiest major Plone upgrade we've ever had.

Open Source: Does it Matter?

written by Matt Hamilton, on Jan 11, 2010 5:40:00 PM.

Last week I attended an event organised by the BCS entitled Public Funds in the UK: Open Source for Document and Content Management?. I'll be doing a full write up of the talks, and indeed put up my own slides from the talk I did in the next day or so... but firstly I wanted to respond to a few blog posts that have come out of the event.

Three specific posts by: Jon Marks, Janus Boye, and Justin Cormack came out in the days after the events, prompted by the panel discussion at the end of the event in which there was discussion about and Open Source vs. Open Standards. Towards the end, the discussion got quite philosophical and the question of "What does 'Open Source' really mean?" was raised. I had to dash to catch the train, so missed the beers afterwards, but no doubt the discussion followed on in the pub.

The end result was Janus posting that he was confused as to what the real benefits are to Open Source, followed by two responses -- one by Jon explaining what standards are used in the CMS world, and the other by Justin talking more about the ethos of Open Source and pointing out that it was developers that first 'got' Open Source, followed by the rest of the world. As someone who is a developer first and a businessman second I guess I took some of those aspects for granted and it was good to read Janus' post to remind me that maybe not everyone sees things quite the same way as I (or other developers) do.

So where did this confusion come about? And what about this whole "What is Open Source?" question? Well let me try and recap some of the points that went back and forth in the panel discussion:

The end user doesn't care if the product is Open Source or Proprietary... they just want the job done
Does access to the source code really matter? If the system has an API, who cares?
The license fee is only a small part of the cost of a project, so does it matter if I have to pay a license fee?
Some proprietary vendors offer free trial versions of their software, so I can evaluate them just as cheaply as Open Source solutions
Open Source means I can own the software
I can do transparent, iterative, agile development just as easily on proprietary platform as an open source one

Now, these are all good points and thinking them through I can see they all have quite a bit of merit. In fact back at the office I was thinking through them all and it is a useful exercise to try and work out really what Open Source means to you as the more you think about it the more non-obvious it becomes.

The first point: does the client really care if they can access the source code or not? Brian Prentice from Gartner wrote a blog post last month comparing Open Source to the just-in-time manufacturing revolution of the car industry and how an end car buyer doesn't care (or even know) that the manufacturer uses JIT or Lean Manufacturing. The end buyer just wants a cheaper/better car customised to their specific requirements. How the manufacturer does it is not a differentiating factor to the buyer. So, on that basis, why should the client care whether a system is Open Source or not? Maybe the client shouldn't... but that doesn't mean that Open Source is any less valuable a proposition. I'm not going to tell Toyota that just because I don't care if they use Lean or not that it doesn't make a different to the end result.

So maybe it is true that 'Open Source' should not be the main marketing message for an Open Source CMS, and should not be the main reason on its own why that solution is chosen, but that doesn't make the fact that it is Open Source any less valuable.

At the moment though, Open Source is a very good badge to try and explain to the client why the product is different and can then be a way to explain the benefits.

Actually the car manufacturing analogy above falls down a bit, as when you buy a car most people don't worry about future extensibility of what they've just bought. Yes, they might want to know if you can fit a roof rack, or how much an annual service costs... but in that case, that is pretty much it. If we instead look at a commercial vehicle, say something like a council looking to purchase a municipal bus. The council will want to know that they will be able to get spares for the next decade or so for their vehicle. They are going to want to be sure that they can service the vehicle themselves if need be (maybe they have their own vehicle service dept.), they want to know that they can get ahold of a Haynes manual (or whatever the commercial equivalent is) for the vehicle so that they can do the service themselves. They will want to know that they can retro-fit a wheelchair lift into it if need be in the future. If they take it into service one day at the main dealer and the dealer tells them the flux capacitor is broken then they can take it to Joe's Garage down the road and get a second opinion. Oh wait, of course the main dealer wouldn't tell them something as preposterous as that! They know that would be daft, as they know Joe's Garage next door would tell them they are talk out of their a*%e. See what I'm getting at here?

If the system has an API do I really need access to the source code? Going the opposite way, one commenter to Janus' blog states he prefers not having access to the source as it helps delineate which bits of the system he can and can't change and that helps when it comes time to upgrade. I can see his point, and anyone who has naively gone in and hacked the core of an Open Source system without following the practices of that project will find themselves in a sticky situation when they come to upgrade. But as he states, unless an API exists to do what you want, you are stuck. If you need to bend a system in such a way that the API doesn't allow then you are out of luck. Then again, having an API doesn't mean upgrades will be plain sailing. Looking at the process for upgrade from Sharepoint 2007 to 2010 looks like it is going to be a far from simple.

The license fee is only a small part of a project cost, so it doesn't matter if I have to pay it. Open Source is not that much cheaper overall. Well this may be the case, but as I've stated before the figures just don't really add up on this. Either a company makes its money from licenses, or makes it from professional services. If all the proprietary CMS vendors say that the license fee isn't a big part and could drop it then I think they would be out of business pretty quickly. Unless they switched to doing more professional services of course... but then see the heat that Ektron have just come under this week regards to them allegedly cannibalizing their channel partners' prospective customers. You know that feeling you get when (in the UK) you take your car in for its MOT test and the garage swears there is no relation between their MOT dept and their service dept? Yeah? same feeling I get with proprietary CMS vendors.

On to Software ownership. There seemed to be a bit of confusion here, as some people seemed to believe that Open Source means you get to own the software. Quite the opposite. The whole point of Open Source is that you don't own the code directly but that it is owned by a collective -- usually by a trust or foundation (such as the Plone Foundation or Apache Software Foundation).

A very good piece of advice given to me many years ago by Paul Everitt (CEO of Digital Creations when they Open Sourced the granddaddy of web publishing platforms, Zope): 'Software is not an asset, it is a liability'. One of the big points of Open Source (particularly 'Community' Open Source as opposed to 'Commercial' Open Source) is that it helps to lower risk of software ownership by spreading the risk. This is easily illustrated by seeing what happens when a proprietary software vendor is bought out by another vendor. History has shown us that often companies end up with duplicate products in their portfolio and one gets dropped. Often these acquisitions are purely business decisions at a high level and can have little bearing on the actual product.

Again, going back to the CMSWire article above on Ektron there was a great anonymous comment that put forward the following scenario:

Interactive Agency (IA) evaluates a CMS product and it seems like a good solution. Perhaps they didn't test enough, or perhaps they assumed that because they were not yet "Certified" they simply did not understand how to do certain things. The marketing material looks slick, and the CMS has tons of ads all over the internet, so IA selects the CMS.

The CMS vendor participates in selling the product into IA's clients, talking up all of the great features and functionality. The clients are impressed and sign on the dotted line.

During the implementation of their 1st site, IA encounters what appear to be bugs in the CMS product, but chalks it up to inexperience. 2nd project, same thing. 3rd project, CMS vendor says "Yeah, we'll fix that in the next version." 4th project, it becomes hard to actually get support from the CMS vendor, but they say they are improving their support soon. 5th project, more bugs, more promises of what's to come. Eventually the new version comes out with the same bugs as the old.

If we look at IA's situation, they now have 5 clients tied into a CMS product that is clearly not all that was promised... a product that makes it difficult for IA to deliver what they promised their client when it should be making it easier. Their options are:

1- Publicly (in a forum such as this, or Twitter, or anywhere on the internet) talk about the negative experience they've had.

2- Keep quiet about the issues so as to not damage their own reputation (poor judgment in selecting a CMS solution), and look at a superior solution (having already gotten little satisfaction from the CMS vendor)

3- Post anonymously when they have a chance.

This doesn't even consider those developers who are not involved in the CMS selection process and are simply frustrated with having to work with a product they consider substandard.

That is a classic example of where a client (on in this case an integrator/agency) ends up beholden to a vendor -- this is where Open Source makes a difference. Open Source adjusts the balance of power between the client/agency and the vendor. In the case above, the agency could have either gone in and fixed the bug themselves (then contributing it back to the project so that they don't have to maintain it in subsequent releases) or paid someone more knowledgeable to fix the issue for them. Either way they are not stuck in a dead end having selected a CMS project and then being let down by the relationship with the vendor.

The relationship with the vendor is one of the most important aspects of a CMS deployment project, and as Jon said at the BCS event, very few projects fail due to the technology. They mostly fail due to project management issues, or relationship issues between the parties involved. That being the case why would you enter into a relationship in which one party holds all the keys? That just doesn't make good business sense.

OK, this blog post has gotten long enough, I better publish it now before or I never will! We can follow up in the comments.

Public Funds in the UK: Open Source for Document and Content Management? - London 07/01/2010

written by Matt Hamilton, on Jan 5, 2010 5:33:00 PM.

Is Open Source a viable way for the public sector to contain its IT costs? Government policy is gradually becoming more favourable to open source. Many commentators identify open source as a way to contain spiralling project costs. Yet much of this discussion is driven by underlying agendas: it contains as much disinformation as realistic appraisal of the capabilities of open source software.

The BCS Open Source Specialist Group is organising an event to look at the reality behind the rhetoric. Responding to the challenge in the above Guardian article, we aim to bring together a group of information management practitioners and vendors to discuss their experience of web and document management in the public sector. The event will consist of a series of talks, panel sessions and open discussion of the challenges of web and document management in the public sector, and the ways in which open source software might be suitable for addressing these challenges.

Netsight Technical Director, Matt Hamilton will be speaking at the event and presenting a series of mini case-studies on public sector organisations successfully using the Plone content management system to provide services with much more transparent costs.

Full details of the event including location and registration details can be found at the BCS website.

The Flexibility of Open Source: A Case Study of a large Corporate Intranet

written by Matt Hamilton, on Dec 14, 2009 5:21:00 PM.

Last week I presented a case study talk at IMS 2009 in London. The talk was entitled 'The Flexibility of Open Source: A Case Study of a large Corporate Intranet'.

The slidecast with audio is below, or you can download the PDF version of the slides, or the MP3 version of the audio.

The Flexibility of Open Source: A Case Study of a large Corporate Intranet

View more documents from Matt Hamilton.

Abstract

The advantages of Open Source systems go beyond simple cost savings. Content management by its very nature requires a significant level of customisation and integration to meet business requirements. By not prohibiting the inspection and modification of the source code, Open Source enables a level of flexibility not available with proprietary systems.

This talk will present a case study of the process one corporation, Belron, went through in the development of a corporate Intranet based on Plone. Belron is the world's largest vehicle glass repair and replacement company, owning some of the best known brands in the industry including Carglass, Autoglass, O'Brien and Safelite. Belron employs more than 19, 500 people working in 28 countries worldwide.

In this talk you will see how the flexibility of Open Source allowed an initial modest Intranet to adapt and grow over time to an organisation's evolving requirements, and the development of multiple sub-sites, specific business processes and multilingual support. You will also see how Open Source's licensing model allows un-fettered growth and deployment of the Intranet to multiple countries.

When all CMSes are Open Source?

written by Matt Hamilton, on Dec 14, 2009 11:52:52 AM.

A blog post today by Janus Boye on some (quite unbelievable) claims by Danish CMS vendor Sitecore got me thinking about something...

Several analysts have talked about the growing trend towards Open Source for Content Management systems. Many people still have this outdated view that Open Source means a free lunch. Well, in the CMS space it doesn't really. You do still need to go through all the due diligence, planning, requirements gathering, customisation, etc that you would do with a commercial system. The main difference being that you are not taking a big hit up front for the license fees and can be a lot more flexible in your approach to the development on top of the CMS as you are not held back by vendor licensing, and are not beholden to one single vendor company.

Commercial CMS vendors like to try and debunk that Open Source gives a lower TCO in a project by stating that the licensing fees are only a small part of the total TCO, and the main chunk is made up of points mentioned above (planning, implementation, etc).

If that is the case and fast forwarding a few years to the point that all CMSes become 'Open Source' (or claim they are Open Source by just giving away some freebie version, or dropping their license fees altogether) how will companies like Sitecore survive, whom according to their numbers in Janus' blog post earned DKK 76M out of a total DKK 79M by license revenue? If the license fees is such a small insignificant part of the total cost of a CMS implementation then how can you base an entire company revenue stream on it?

IMS 2009 - Final Day and Roundup

written by Matt Hamilton, on Dec 4, 2009 4:52:00 PM.

This year we have been representing Plone at the IMS / Online 2009 expo at Earl Court Olympia in London.

The final day of IMS was a bit slower that the previous two days, which might have been a blessing in disguise as we were all feeling a little tired after the previous two days of non-stop talking to people on the stand.

That said we still had a good number of people come to the stand to come and see Plone. One person came down from the Online 09 conference happening up in the conference centre saying "I've been seeing a lot about Plone on Twitter, so thought I'd come take a look".

Again, another very diverse lot of people coming to the stand, we talked to a high street mobile phone retailer, a large publishing company, a nursing college, a university, an association of barristers, a django developer, and a school, amongst many others.

In total over the three days we handed out over 250 Plone brochures, probably spoke to about 300 people on the stand, and collected contact details around a hundred people who wanted more information on Plone... and gave countless demos of Plone to people coming to the stand. That means we spoke to one person about every 4 minutes... no wonder my throat was hoarse by the end!

To get an impression of just how busy it was, here is a time lapse video of the stand from the viewpoint of the two inbuilt cameras on the iMacs we were doing demos on. They are arranged at roughly 90 degree angle to each other with a photo captured every 20 seconds, so you have 3 days of activity on the stand compressed down to nearly two minutes.

So, so long IMS 2009! It was great, and we'll see everyone there next year.

Day Two of IMS 2009

written by Matt Hamilton, on Dec 2, 2009 11:22:00 PM.

This year we have been representing Plone at the IMS / Online 2009 expo at Earl Court Olympia in London.

After a great start with day one we were back to start day two of the expo. I went over to the venue a bit earlier today for a meeting with Janus Boye of JBoye to talk a bit about the state of Plone and to bounce a quite interesting idea around, which hopefully we will reveal soon.

The main show floor then opened at 10:00 and people started coming to the Plone stand to chat about Plone. I was presenting a talk in one of the show floor lecture theatres on 'The Flexibility of Open Source: A Case Study of a Large Corporate Intranet' at 11:15, so Astra and Chris set about wandering the show floor to hand out more flyers we'd created for the show. One side of the flyers was the Flexible Plone advert we created, and the other side some promo about my talk.

Plone case study talk - the Plone community

My talk was the second talk of the day, and was preceded by a talk entitled 'Moving a large institution to an Open Source WCM system' by Richard Morgan from the Victoria & Albert Museum here in London. His talk focussed on the evaluation and procurement process they went through to eventually end up at a decision to use Squiz's MySource Matrix as a CMS. One of the key points he made was the importance of the relationship between the client and the vendor and how he really enjoyed the 'colocation days' they did (customer sprints in the Plone world). As it happened this turned out to be a great introduction to my talk, which was then taking the Open Source story a bit further and presenting a specific case study of a Plone based intranet for a large client of ours. My talk was packed to capacity with standing room left only, about 60 people in total.

Plone case study talk - initial Intranet requirements

The talk went really very well, and I even managed to keep to time pretty accurately. The talk described the relationship with one of our clients over the past three years and how their initial intranet has grown and evolved over that time to encompass a number of specific business processes.

Plone case study talk - development process

Following the talk we had a rush on the Plone stand and were doing demos non stop for the next couple of hours until lunch time. As usual I'll be putting a Slidecast of my talk on Slideshare.net as soon as I've edited the audio.

After lunch thing quietened down a bit at the show, but by the end of the day we had handed out about 150 brochures over the first two days and spoken to even more people than we did yesterday.

We did have one quite amusing incident towards the end of the day, where some random guy decided to impart his aged wisdom to us and loudly proclaimed that we needed a 'gobble gobble' machine and needed to buy up all the competing CMS systems in the market (as there are too many to choose from) kill the competitors off and then sell stock options. I think in all his wisdom he had completely missed the point of Open Source. He told us we were wrong and that we needed a USP. I told him our USP was that by being Open Source, companies who spend time and money investing in using Plone as their CMS can rest safe in the knowledge that their CMS won't be bought out by a 'gobble gobble' machine and killed off by someone following his advice. He didn't get it. Oh well. I'm sure he'll catch up with the modern world one day.

Once the show closed at 5pm we headed over to the Hilton next door for the vendors drinks reception and caught up with the Squiz guys for a chat and some beers.

The Plone stand at Gilbane Boston

As we were wrapping up for the day, the Gilbane conference in Boston seemed to be revving up to full swing and pics were coming in of the Plone stand there. It was great to see the pic of the stand there and to see the new plone brochures on display. With Thanksgiving just last weekend, Nate, Ken et al must have worked incredibly hard to get them printed in time. As I headed back to my hotel room, checking twitter, a panel discussion between Plone, Drupal, Joomla! and Alfresco was just kicking off... go Plone!

Tomorrow is the last day of both IMS and Gilbane, so if you want to come along and find out more about Plone and you are in either London or Boston then please do come along for a chat.

Day One of IMS 2009

written by Matt Hamilton, on Dec 2, 2009 12:21:00 AM.

This year we have been representing Plone at the IMS / Online 2009 expo at Earl Court Olympia in London.

Netsight staff on the Plone stand

It's the end of the first day of the show, and its been a fantastic day. We arrived yesterday to setup the new Plone stand we've had printed and arranged the stand in a similar fashion to the previous shows we've been to with the big display stand along the back, two iMacs on funky stands either side and a literature stand near the front of the stand. Once again we had a nice corner stand which was open on two sides making it much more accessible and approachable to passers by.

New Plone Stand

As well as the new stand background, we have produced some new, very sexy, Plone brochures explaining all about Plone (both the software and the community) and Open Source. We've released the brochures under the Creative Commons license so you can download the PDF and the original Adobe InDesign files if you want to modify them.

We also printed up a bunch of information sheets of Plone in specific sectors (Non-profit, Public Sector, Education, Enterprise, NHS) based upon templates supplied by Nate Aune at Jazkarta.

New Plone Literature

These brochures have already been modified by Nate Aune and Ken Wasetis for use at the Gilbane conference happening at the moment in Boston.

Yes, that's right... running from the 1st - 3rd December Plone is simultaneously being presented at both the IMS / Online 2009 expo in London and the Gilbane 2009 conference in Boston!

Whilst this year there seemed to be a lot fewer visitors in general on the show floor, the IMS conference organisers report a greater number of pre-registrations to last year. We've certainly found that whilst there are less people passing the stand, there have been a greater percentage stopping to chat to us, so in fact I think we've had a more successful first day overall.

Once again, the sheer diversity of people coming to chat to us about Plone has been amazing. We've spoken to a large well known Orchestra, several people from the Ministry of Defence, some medical publishing companies, a university, a society for women in engineering... all of whom have shown fantastic response to Plone. In fact, just 4 minutes after the doors opened to the public this morning, the very first person to come to the stand was from a business school in London who have been using Plone for about 6 years and was saying just how amazing it was.

Another notable thing was the absence of some well known large commercial CMS vendors who I was expecting to see. Jadu, Open Text, Ektron, Fatwire and Percussion were all vendors who were attended last year, but were not here this time. Last year Jadu had an enormous stand visible from almost anywhere on the show floor. Maybe commercial CMS vendors are feeling the pinch this year?

There were a few Open Source systems represented there: Squiz (MySource Matrix) and eZ Systems (eZ Publish), but Plone was the only true community Open Source company represented. Interestingly, compared to last year there were far more people aware of Plone, and far fewer people who said 'We've heard of Drupal and Joomla, what is Plone?'. So I think our attendance at these style of events (both IMS 2008 and Internet World 2009) is showing signs of increasing awareness of Plone. We probably talked to about 80-100 people today and gave demos of Plone to most of them.

I also got a chance to have a good chat with Tony Byrne from CMS watch and have a look at their 2010 Web Content Management report and read the Plone chapter in it. Its pretty complimentary, but there are a few points that need updating in the report so I'll be submitting my feedback to them to hopefully be taken into account for the next update.

Tomorrow morning I'm giving a talk at 11:15 in Theatre A on 'The Flexibility of Open Source: A Case Study of a Large Corporate Intranet'. So if you are about in London, go to the IMS website and register for free and come along and say hello.

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