Dutch Plone User Day
Well I am on the train back to the airport now from Arnhem, after being invited to present the keynote at the Dutch Plone User Day 2009. The event was hosted this year by Four Digits, with talks given by them and other members of SZP, the Dutch Zope and Plone association. Whilst the Netherlands might be a pretty small country it probably has the highest concentration of active Plone development companies per capita with the likes of Four Digits, Zest, Pareto, Infrae and Goldmund, Wyldebeast & Wunderliebe just a few of the Dutch companies attending the event.
The User Day (Gebruikersdag) was held at Villa Sonsbeek, in the middle of Sonsbeek park in central Arnhem with a fantastic turnout of around 50 attendees, a mix of about half developers and half end users.
With the exception of my keynote, all the other talks were in Dutch... something I found pretty hard on my brain, but great to see events being run in local languages around the world. I doubt even the largest commercial CMSes have user communities that are as well represented across the globe as Plone has.
The day was opened with a welcome by Martijn Schenk of Four Digits who chaired the day with his unmistakable lively style.
My keynote, Plone: Revised Roadmap - Plone 3,4,5 and Beyond (on Slideshare, complete with audio of talk), was mainly taken from the excellent talks by Geir Baekholt at the European Plone Symposium in Sorrento, and by Alex Limi at the Plone Symposium East in Pennsylvania. The talk was a run down of where we are currently with Plone with the 3.3 release and the plans for a Plone 4 release later this year, and Plone 5 sometime in 2010.
The goal of Plone 3 has been to provide stability, predictability and maturity for the end users, integrators and the developers. One criticism of Open Source projects is often that they move so fast that people are having to continually learn new APIs, making long term support and upgrades difficult.
The Plone project has managed to counter this by having separate framework teams and release managers for each of the Plone 3.x, 4.x and what will become 5.x branches. So whilst Plone 3 provides a consistent platform for developers, Plone 4 and beyond we can be a bit more adventurous.
Plone 4 will see the integration of a number of packages that have been well tested so far in the field to provide an incremental improvement on Plone 3, whereas Plone 5 will be where we can really redefine how content management is done and bring in some more radical features in terms of content editing and the UI.
Plone developers have also been working on cleaning up the Plone codebase, removing unused dependancies and packages and doing further optimisation, resulting in a 25% decrease in lines of code in the Plone codebase, and improvements in out-of-the-box page load times for both anonymous and logged in users of a whopping 400%!
My talk was followed by a case study by Jacquelijn Ringersma from the Max Planck Institute for Physics talking about their use of Plone within an academic research environment and how, with the help of Jean-Paul Ladage and his team at Zest, they integrated Plone in with various external databases of staff information and also manage their bibliographic database and submissions to scientific journals.
Next up was a presentation from Jeroen Vloothuis from Pareto another Dutch development company, showcasing a wide variety of Dutch sites using Plone. His talk concluded with some audience participation in which everyone wrote down their top good and bad point about Plone. These were then collated and discussed with the Plone users present in the room, a great example of being able to get direct feedback from the Plone users community. Jeroen has written a blog post detailing the findings and comments from this session.
A fantastic buffet lunch was arranged and a chance for people to chat and go outside on the terrace of the building and enjoy the sunshine and surroundings of the park. Arnhem apparently has the largest number of green spaces of any of the Dutch cities, and standing there watching the cows pass by you'd easily forget you were in the middle of a city.
After lunch there were two further talks, a case study of the Sensire/Yunio Intranet by Ralph Jacobs (Four Digits) and Andre Hermsen, followed by a talk by Kees Hink of Goldmund, Wyldebeast & Wunderliebe on Deliverance one of the new theming products for Plone.
The formal part of the day finished off with short 7-minute long 'lightning talks' in which various members of the audience came up to give a short talk on a variety of Plone projects they were working on including a look at some of the new technologies that will be included in upcoming Plone versions.
The majority of the talks are available on slideshare.net and you can read more about the details of the Dutch talks on Four Digits' blog post
After the closing remarks by Martijn Schenk[*] it was back out to the terrace for further talks, over beers and nibbles.
The guys from Four Digits had then arranged dinner at a local restaurant where more beer was consumed and a very fine selection of Mezze was served, followed by another bar for a few more beers and putting the world to rights.
This morning, I checked out of the hotel with a slightly fuzzy head and headed over to the Four Digits office to do some work before I had to head off. Four Digits have a fantastic office in central Arnhem complete with a flag pole on the balcony with the Four Digits flag flying. It is always interesting to see how other Plone companies work, and there is a very strong sense of camaraderie at Four Digits, with everyone eating lunch together each day in the conference room.
It has been a fantastic trip, and once again proof of not only how well organised the Plone community can be, how professional and proficient the Plone development companies are, but also of just how much fun it is to be part of such a vibrant community. See you all hopefully in Budapest in a few months!
-Matt
[*] In the closing remarks 'Schenky' presented me with a box of traditional local cookies, whose literal translation into English is apparently not straight forward, but the closest they could get was 'Little Arnhem Girls'... I know what you are thinking, but I have been assured that they are entirely legal and I will make it through airport security. ;)
