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Well, I'm now back from the 7th Annual Plone Conference 2009 in Budapest, sat at my desk with the post-conference come-down as the excitement of a conference fades away. Once again the Plone community has come together and put on an absolutely awesome event. Considering the general doom and gloom about the world economy, it was amazing to see over 400 people attend the conference (I think this is the largest yet).

Netsight had a delegation of 6 people this year: Adam, Adrian, Ben, Daniel, Matt H, and Matt SS, plus honorary Netsighter Dan Fairs along as well. Daniel gave a talk on "Extending Plone: Using python to integrate with external data sources" showing people new to Plone how easy it is to extend Plone with a few lines of python code to get data from Google Docs, Twitter and YouTube into Plone. Matt SS gave two lightning talks, the first one 'Products.TranslateInPlace' which allows you to update Plone's UI translations whilst browsing the site so you can see the translations in context. The second was a practical demonstration on some work we've been doing on re-skinning a legacy .NET portal using Deliverance.

I co-presented a talk with Steve McMahon on 'How Does Plone Happen?' in which we had a very informal, tag-team, talk about the various aspects of how Plone is developed and how the people behind the code, the release process, the day to day chat and support on the Plone IRC channel and mailing lists all adds up to create the multi-million dollar value body of work we call Plone, and the Foundation that protects and promotes it.

At the last minute I was also asked to be on a panel discussion led by Sally Kleinfeldt of Jazkarta on Plone Web Services, along with Matthew Wilkes, Calvin Hendryx-Parker, and Alec Mitchell. We discussed the various existing ways of getting data in and out of Plone via XML-RPC, WebDAV etc. and also the new AtomPub WSGI middleware for Plone written by Chelsea Bingiel as part of the Google Summer of Code. We also discussed the pros and cons of looking to implement CMIS, a proposed standard for interoperability of CMSes.

The conference as a whole was extremely well organised, and credit goes to Balazs Ree and the rest of the organising team from Greenfinity and the other volunteers for their hard work in making it such a success. Budapest is such a beautiful city for the event and a great host country.

I was involved in the production of the conference talks schedule this year and leading the talks committee. After putting the call out for talk submissions we had over 70 talks for about 45 slots available, which unfortunately meant that we didn't have space to fit all of them in the time available. I have to say though, this year that quality of the talks -- not just their content, but delivery -- exceeded all previous years.

It was great to see what is coming up in Plone 4 and a chance for conference attendees to ask the Plone core developers and Framework team any questions they had about features of the upcoming release. For me, personally though, the talks that really showed how far we've come as a community over the years were the number and quality of the business and case study talks I managed to get to:

• Frank DiMauro from UNC Healthcare System in the US on the CMS Impact on Corporate Culture
• Francesco Ciriaci from Reflab in Italy on the Medicins Sans Frontieres International Intranet
• Peter Breithaupt from N.V. Nederlandse Gasunie in The Netherlands talking about his experiences and successes of getting Plone introduced into large scale business operations
• Chantal Foster and Alex Sielicki from FosterMilo in the US talking about getting Plone into three Government institutions in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

It's talks like these that show that Plone, both as a CMS and as a community really are able to provide large organisations with the solution they need, and with far more flexibility and agility than many commercial CMS rivals.

Plone is promoted and protected by the Plone Foundation, a not for profit legal foundation that holds the IP of Plone. Each year the foundation elects a new board of directors, whose job it is to oversee the legal and promotional aspects of Plone. It is tradition for the final board meeting of the board each year, the AGM, to be held at the Plone Conference. The board presented the accounts for the foundation and spoke briefly of the achievements in the past year, including the introduction of a relicensing policy for Plone components, and guidelines around logo usage and its new marketing budget. The fact we now have a budget for marketing is a testament to the community and the generous companies that sponsor the Plone Foundation.

This year, I ran again for the Plone Foundation board and was elected onto the new board. Its an honour to be re-elected by my community peers and to serve again on the board. Once again we have a great bunch of people on the board, and will carry forward on the momentum of the previous year to make Plone even better.

At the end of the second day, there was the conference dinner at the Museum of Transportation. There was something quite surreal, but very pleasing about being sat drinking a beer with other Plonistas in a vintage railway carriage! Looking around upstairs at some of the photos of Budapest's shipping heritage made me do a double take as quite a few photos looked identical to Bristol city docks.

The third day was started off with a Keynote by Georg Greve of the Free Software Foundation Europe, entitled 'Rising to the Challenge of our Own Success'.

Then we had something new for the conference: an Open Space day. The third day had absolutely no agenda before the conference began. In an Open Space (also known as an unconference) the attendees themselves propose talks and put them up on a large board and a schedule is created organically by the people at the event. This fell under my remit to organise, something which I have to admit I was a bit nervous about, as I was quite worried that we'd end up with an empty board an no talks. Of course I needn't have worried at all. Within about 10 minutes of putting the board up, the majority of the slots were filled, and within an hour the board was full.

I proposed a talk on 'Plone Marketing - Producing brochures and case studies' which was very well attended with about 20-30 people there all interested in promoting Plone further and producing high quality marketing materials.

Overall, from the feedback I've had the Open Spaces day worked very well, and I think we should repeat it again next year. And if I'm involved in it next year I promise I won't forget how to count and mess up the timeslots as I did this year ;)

Anyways, I'd just like to repeat again what an amazing event it was, and what a fantastic community Plone is. It really is something that sets Plone the software apart from other CMS systems out there.

If you missed out, you can catch up with some of the banter on Twitter and see the photos of the event on Flickr. Also a bunch of the talks were streamed live and recorded on ustream.tv. A few of the presentations are on slideshare too. Maurits van Rees did an excellent job live blogging all the talks he was in.

-Matt