Plone at Europython

Last week Netsight were at the Europython 2009 conference in Birmingham, UK. The main reason we were there was to learn about all the cool stuff happening now in the Python world, but we also wanted to promote Plone as well.

To be honest it was a fairly last minute decision as we have just been so busy at Netsight in the past couple of months with client work. Also most of the Netsight team going (Matt, Daniel, Adam, Scott and honorary Netsight member, Dan F) are mainly Python and Zope developers, not really Plone developers. That said, as I've said before, nowadays you don't need to know that much Plone-specific knowledge to be useful in a Plone context, as much of it now is straight forward python development.

The Europython team graciously gave the Plone Foundation a space to have a stand at the conference free of charge. We just needed to bring the materials with us. I wasn't organised enough in time to get any of the bulk order of Plone stickers the foundation had printed up sent over, or get any more printed up locally. We were also traveling by train to Birmingham so didn't want to take too much stuff with us. We mainly took our large vertical Plone banner, a stack of Plone bags, some of the 'Top 15 Questions About Plone' leaflets and some of our Plone brochures with us.

It was actually quite a different feel, as most of the marketing material we've been creating at Netsight for advocating Plone has been aimed at expos such as Internet World, and IMS in which we are competing against a lot of commercial players. As such much of our material was 'preaching to the converted' in terms of 'What is Open Source?' and the likes. For developers at a conference like this I think we really just needed lots of cool schwag to give away. Items like the Six Feet Up Plone bottle openers or t-shirts would have gone down well.

A few people came up to the stand to come talk to us to find out about Plone, and see what it is up to these days, though we didn't get as many as I was expecting. I think most people either 1) know about it 2) think they already know about it ;) or 3) don't care as they use X instead and why would they want to learn about other systems.

There were some other Plone development companies and individuals there, and we had a great Thai dinner one evening with Martijn and Roel from Four Digits and Laurence Rowe from Jarn. We also bumped into quite a few of the usual faces from the Plone and Zope world: Aiste Kesminaite (POV), Kit Blake (Infrae), Martijn Faassen (Startifact), Christian Theune (Gocept), Chris Withers (Simplistix), Christian Scholtz (COM.lounge), Charlie Clark (eGenix).

Next year I want to try an arrange a bigger Plone presence at Europython, as there were actually no talks on Plone at Europython at all this year (versus about 13 that mention Django in their abstract). I especially think a 'State of Plone' talk (like the ones done by Geir Baekholt and Alex Limi at the European and US Plone symposiums) would be a good idea. A tutorial on doing simple pythonic things in Plone such as creating a viewlet in Plone using Grok would be a great way to show the rest of the python community how easy it can be to get involved in Plone these days.

There have also been a great number of tools that have come out of the Zope world, and used extensively by Plone. The most immediately obvious one is buildout, which I think would be a great tool for with wider python community, but most other projects haven't come across it yet. Martijn Faassen did a great talk on 'Things that I helped Create' which was a journey through his life creating things starting as a kid. It was a fantastic insight into the creative process. Alas he ran out of time before he got onto the more recent items, in which he was going to be talking about some of these tools. One of the Four Digits guys was due to do a Lightning Talk too on Plone, but again time ran out before he had his chance.

-Matt

Photo credits: SafPlusPlus and MrTopf