Blog

Plone Open Garden 2012 - Sorrento

Matt Hamilton — Tue, 08 May 2012 17:55:00 +0100

Once again this year I attended the Plone Open Garden event in Sorrento, Italy. This is an event I look forward to during the year as it gives a chance to really take a step back and chat with people about what is going on in the world of Plone. This year the event went fully to an unconference style and there were no pre-scheduled talks. The number of attendees was smaller this year than in previous years, but that just served to give the event a more intimate feel and a bit more like a sprint than a conference.

We had the use of an indoor meeting room which we used for when we wanted to show or present things on a projector, but otherwise most of the discussions took place outside in the sunshine at the pool terrace.

The thing I like most about this event is the chance to sit down outside in the evening and chat to other Plonistas about the future of Plone and find out more about their businesses and how things are going. It is great to compare issues that affect us all but may be slightly different in each country, e.g. public sector rules on accessibility or procurement. This gives us a chance to try and work out where common things can be shared between businesses instead of us all going our own way on it.

Of course, the food, the sunshine, the scenery and the general Italian hospitality are big draws to the event. In Italy family is a very important thing and you can tell this with the attitude to kids compared to in the UK. In Italy a child running about and making noise playing is celebrated rather than frowned upon...

...so in a slight fit of madness I brought my wife and 16 month old daughter along on the trip too. This was my daughter's first time on a plane and whilst things were not entirely to plan everything did in the end work out great. They both went off to explore the sights of Pompeii, Sorrento and the Amalfi coast whilst the rest of us were busy working.

My main, personal, goal for going to PLOG was to work on the upcoming plone.com site. This is a site to be aimed at the decision makers and end users looking at Plone rather than the developers (which plone.org is aimed at). This project has had a bit of a delay getting off the ground, so I was determined to get some specific tasks done at the event.

The first task was to work on a 'feature list' for Plone. As crazy as it sounds this is something that we don't really have for Plone. If you go to Plone.org at the moment there is a list of new features in Plone 4 versus the previous version of Plone, but there is no one list of 'What is Plone?' for a decision maker. There has been various things to tackle this in the past such as the Plone Brochure that we produced at Netsight, the Top Twenty Questions About Plone ref cards produced by Six Feet Up and the German Plone Brochure produced by DZUG. But we don't have this in a single concise customer facing website.

If you ask a dozen people 'What is Plone?' you are likely to get a dozen different answers due to the fact that Plone is a very flexible system and used in so many different settings. Another effort going on at the moment and just released for public consumption is the new Plone Roadmap. Plone has always had a roadmap of sorts before but never anything quite as great as this. The Roadmap Team have done a spectacular job in creating this (and special mention to Martin Aspeli, Jon Stahl and Mark Corum who did the lion's share of the work). One of the great things with this roadmap is it attempts to focus the scope of the Plone development going forward by framing it in a context of specifically what Plone is and isn't suited for.

On the second day of the event I presented the Roadmap to the attendees and explain its purpose and to walk through the contents of it. Standing on the shoulders of others I managed to find (about 5 minutes before my talk) that Massimo Azzolini had presented the roadmap a couple of weeks earlier at World Plone Day in Bologne. His presentation is well worth a look if you want an Italian translation of the roadmap or simply want a good inspiration on how the roadmap could be presented at future events.

We started off at PLOG by brainstorming a complete list of features we could think of that Plone has. Now this on it's own is not worth much, but gives a very good starting point as to what we want to put down as the top twenty features for Plone. We did this old-skool with a big flip chart and people called out things. The great thing with this was there were so many obvious features that often, as those working within Plone itself, we completely forget. e.g. the fact you can just copy and paste a piece of content in Plone or a whole folder of items is pretty cool and something that is simply not present in many CMSes. This resulted in a list of 80 points. The next step which is currently underway is to sort through them, pick a top twenty and expand upon those points as to the benefit of that feature to the intended audience.

The second item I was working on there is a showcase list of Plone sites. Sure we have the sites listed on Plone.org but that is a very very big list of over 2200 sites and it can be hard to find the exceptional ones in there to showcase. We also want to capture some more information, e.g. What was it about Plone that made this site a success. Also to capture featured technologies used, which may be either Plone add-ons or may be 3rd party systems used in conjunction with Plone. I managed to get a starter list of 16 sites from mainly around Europe (since it was mainly Europeans at the event). The amazing thing for me was that whilst I think I know of a lot of good showcase Plone sites in the world, about three quarters of these sites I had never even heard of. Did you know that the main tourism site for the Emilia Romagna region in Italy uses Plone as does the city of Ferrara? Or that the USAID Resource Management Portal uses Plone to help its missions, staff and partners coordinate in field operations across time and distance? Or that Our Africa uses Plone to let children across Africa film their lives and countries the way they see them.

The list needs further information to fill in the blanks and I need to get in contact with some more people outside Europe to get a good spread of sites.

Besides the Plone.com work I wanted to get done there were a number of other things going on. Maurits van Rees has a good summary writeup on his blog.

It wasn't all heads in laptops though as there was time for a quick splash in the pool before lunch on most days. Oh lunch... wow.... another reason I love this place.

One of the other things I found very interesting was chatting with a developer I met there, Giampiero Lago. He is a relative newcomer to Plone and came from a Wordpress background. He was working on a document to help those coming from Wordpress to Plone as to the similarities and differences. It covers things such as terminology differences and some basic information to get started. I am currently working with a client to look at migrating their Wordpress sites to Plone or perhaps their Plone sites to Wordpress. It is a bit undecided yet. One idea I had was if we could somehow create collective.wordpress or similar as a product that was mainly UI changes that made a blog in Plone a bit more familiar to Wordpress users. Giampiero gave me a tour of the Wordpress admin are and what bits are used by authors. It seems though that a lot can depend on what theme you are using in Wordpress, so it looks like moving from one theme to another in Wordpress could be as different as moving from Wordpress to Plone. He also showed me just how easy it is to break out of Wordpress and potentially mess with the underlying OS if you happen to get access as a regular user with the web interface. Scary.

All in all it was a great event, and I wished I had another day or two to enjoy the area. As it was we ended up literally sprinting through the airport terminal to catch our plane home as they called our name over the PA system. Easyjet managed to not print all our boarding passes correctly and I had to turn back from security to go back to the check-in desk.

Thanks to the organisers of the event, in particular Maurizio Delmonte and Vincenzo Barone for their hospitality and putting on a fantastic event. See you next year!

World Plone Day 2012: Bristol, UK

Matt Hamilton — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 11:40:00 +0100

World Plone day is happening this Wednesday the 25th of April. What is World Plone Day? It is a chance for companies and organisations all across the globe to run some kind of event related to Plone. Whether it is a marketing event aimed at business people or a technical event aimed at developers, each location is free to choose how they want to participate.

You can find out more about World Plone Day on plone.org and see the list of the hosts worldwide. So far this year there are 36 events planned.

This year, Netsight will be running a very informal event aimed at getting local Plone developers to do a bit of a show and tell about what they are working on. Whilst Plone is a global project and we are great at attending event worldwide we often neglect the local level. The last time the Netsight and Delib developers got together was in San Francisco, despite our offices being only half a mile away from each other in Bristol!

So, if you are doing something with Plone or want to find out a bit more about it 'from the horse's mouth' then feel free to come along. Netsight will be providing beer and pizza and we'll just take some time to chat about what we are doing and a few brief demos and lightning talks.

When

25 April 2012 from 18:00 - 21:00ish

Where

Netsight Office, 40 Berkeley Square, Clifton, Bristol, UK. We are in the corner of Berkeley Square above Jones Lang Lasalle (previously King Sturge). Ring the buzzer marked 'Netsight' to the right of the door.

What

Whilst Plone is a great global community, we rarely take time to actually chat with local Plone developers. This will be a chance to get people together and chat about some of the cool and interesting projects we are all working on. It will also be a chance for those who want to find out about Plone to come along and find out more 'from the horse's mouth'

Netsight will be providing some beer and pizza.

Why

Fun, education and Plone marketing

Who

The people at Netsight and various others around Bristol.

'10 Intranet Lessons' event moving to new Birmingham venue

Astra Baker — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 14:05:00 +0100

After the success of our last two events '10 Lessons learned from building successful corporate intranets and portals' we have decided to host another event, this time in Birmingham.

We have managed to find a venue as exciting and unique as the SS Great Britain, and by choosing a more central location we are aiming to encourage a new audience.

The event will be held on Thursday 28th June at The Science Museum "Thinktank" at Millenium point in Birmingham.

Delegates will have the opportunity to walk around the museum free of charge after lunch. This will be another free, half day event, ideal for anyone involved in the implementation or management of a corporate intranet or portal, or anyone considering building an intranet.

For more information:

Download our event overview PDF

THE DATE

28th June 2012

THE PRICE

It's Free

THE VENUE

Thinktank
Millennium Point
Curzon Street
Birmingham
B4 7XG

HOW TO REGISTER

Secure your place either:

online

10intranetlessons.eventbrite.com

or by email

info@netsight.co.uk

(Attendees will be entitled to free entry to the science museum either before or after the session programme.)

GovWest and Building and Intranet Your People Will Love

Matt Hamilton — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 17:18:32 +0000

Two events I'll be speaking at this week:

GovWest

Due to a drop out of a speaker, I volunteered to speak at the GovWest event in Bath tomorrow. This event is being organised by Matt Jukes as part of the Bath Digital Festival and is one of the UK Gov Camp series. Gov West is a halfday mini-conference consisting of nine 20 minute, case study talks from digital leaders working in or with the public sector with a particular focus on speakers from the Westcountry.

10 Lessons learned from building successful corporate intranets and portals

A.K.A Building and Intranet Your People Will Love. This is an event being organised specifically by Netsight and held at the SS Great Britain this Wednesday. Full details can be found here. The event is free, and we have a few tickets still left, so if you are interested, please register here.

In both cases I will be doing a talk (slightly different variations at each event) on "Why Open Source? What About Sharepoint?".

Hopefully see you at one of the events!

Plone Konferenz Munich a Success

Matt Hamilton — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 10:20:00 +0000

This month, the Plone Konferenz München 2012 took place. I was invited along to the event by the organiser, Philip Bauer from Starzel.de to present a keynote talk. I was only able to make a very quick visit to the conference, and arrived at lunchtime on the second day of the conference, and had to leave towards the end of the third day. The Plone Konferenz is a predominantly German-speaking event aimed at the German, Austrian and Swiss Plone user base. That said, there were attendees from as far away as South Africa and Seattle.

The conference was organised and arranged by the Munich Plone User's Group with support from the Python Software Verband. This community has a long history of running its own events, with the DZUG (German Speaking Zope User Group) conferences that were held annually.

As I arrived at the venue I was blown away by the level of professionalism in the organisation and marketing of the event. There were banners, table covers, door signs, literature stands, and a giant wall mural all emblazoned with the Plone logo and the Plone Konference München logo. Neatly prepared welcome packs were given to us on arrival containing a printed booklet all about the conference, with maps, speaker biographies, and talk descriptions.

There were two parallel tracks running over three days with lightning talks and open spaces scattered liberally through the programme. With over 150 attendees and over 30 talks it was a very nicely sized event. Talks ranged from case studies to more in-depth technical talks on various aspects of Plone.

Keynotes were delivered by Elizabeth Leddy (Old Dogs, New Tricks), Prof. Udo Helmbrecht (Reducing IT security risk) and myself ("... It's Like Buying a Relationship").

Liz's keynote on Old Dogs, New Tricks talked about what is coming up in Plone future releases and some statistics on the development. I didn't get to the conference until the day after her keynote, so unfortunately missed it, but had a chance to look over the slides of her talk.

One bit that caught my eye was the graph above of active Plone committers over the years. Recently we have lost a few good developers in the Plone community and some might get the feeling that the Plone development has been slowing. The numbers however show something very different. The trend is definitely growth over the years, and we are experiencing quite a big spike of new developers at the moment, which is very good to see.

For my keynote I wanted to pick up on a theme I first talked about at Plone Symposium East last year on the truly global nature of Plone. Events such as Plone Konferenz and Plone Symposium East are great at providing events attractive to local communities. In my keynote I asked the audience how many people were at their first Plone event, and over half the hands in the theatre went up. This is an amazing statistic to show that events like this are reaching out to new people and bringing them in to the community.

One of the aspects that always amazes me about the reach and power of the Plone community is the number of localised community groups there are. Groups aimed at providing information and support in local languages, regions and markets show just how mature the community is. The goal of my keynote was to really point out to those just coming in to the community that whilst acting and working locally they are actually coming in to a global community. Those that have been in the Plone community for a while know this, but I think it is a point to make explicitly as I think it is unique... even amongst other OSS projects. As I was waiting at the airport to come home, I got a tweet from someone at the conference, which makes me think I succeeded:

One of the highlights for me, was the Plone vs. Typo3 shootout. Typo3 is a PHP-based CMS that has a very active following in Germany. The two 'opponents' were Timo Stollenwerk (Plone) and Sebastian Böttger (Typo3) and was a series of real world scenarios put forward by the compère for each to answer. I have to thank Sebastian for his bravery in stepping into the lion's den, and it was great from a Plone point of view to see a bit more in depth of another system. I was surprised that, despite it's German fan-base and being in a German speaking conference doing a shoot-out in German, that Typo3's admin interface was all in English. Plone, of course, was showing its internationalisation strengths and was in German.

The conference dinner and party was held at a restaurant not far from the venue, and was a great chance to catch up and chat further to everybody at the event. The beer, as usual, was certainly flowing freely for the whole night. A big thanks to the sponsors!

The first videos from the conference have started to be put online already, and the quality is some of the best I've seen for a Plone event, with good editing moving between slides and the camera on the presenter. The rest should be up very soon.

Alas, I couldn't stay for the sprints afterwards, but people had already started working on things before the conference was even over. As I left, Elizabeth Leddy was taking on the task of whipping the Plone bug tracker into shape and closing out a load of old tickets in there.

Nejc Zupan and others were working on a new Plone API which looks very promising. A good sign is they are starting with writing the API documentation first, before even the tests and the code.

This has overall been a fantastic event, and if such a thing existed, a model conference for the Plone community. I hope it is an event that is re-run in future years. Thanks to all the organising team for a great event.

Along with the recent ArtSprint in Vienna, this kicks off a great year of Plone events. Coming up soon will be the Plone Symposium East 2012, in Pennsylvania, USA and Plone Open Gardens 2012 in Sorrento, Italy. Both of which look set to be fantastic events.

Plone Konferenz Munich 2012

Matt Hamilton — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 13:15:09 +0000

Speaking of events, I've been invited over to Munich next week to deliver one of the keynote talks at the Plone Konferenz that is being hosted there. There are 34 talks over three days. Most of the talks will be in German, but a few will be in English.

The keynote speakers are:

Prof. Udo Helmbrecht - Head of the EU Agency ENISA in IT security
Elizabeth Leddy - Plone Framework team - San Francisco, USA

Myself, Matt Hamilton - President of the Plone Foundation

This is looking like it is going to be a fantastic event, and it is great to see local-language events such as these happening in the Plone community as it shows just how much reach we have. In fact... that is part of what I will be talking about in my keynote "...It's Like Buying a Relationship":

"Software is developed and sold in many different ways. We will be looking at the relationships between the various parties and looking at what makes Plone CMS quite unique in the world. We will then take a look at Plone across the globe and see how the localization of Plone goes beyond just the software itself to the community as a whole."

Alas, I am only going to be able to make a very brief visit and won't be able to stay for the whole event, but will be there from Thursday lunchtime until about Friday lunchtime. I will however make the party on Thursday evening ;)

I will also be giving a case-study talk on Friday morning of the ongoing work we have been doing on a Plone-based intranet for Belron® the parent company of Carglass® in Germany (and Autoglass® in the UK).

See you there!

A Year of Plone

Matt Hamilton — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 16:35:00 +0000

Someone recently asked on a mailing list I am on about what sort of conferences they should attend as a web developer. Quite a few general ones were mentioned, then people started saying about getting along to the conferences for the tools and software that they particularly use. So I got thinking about what is coming up in 2012 for the Plone world... and once I started writing it down it turned out to be a pretty impressive list so thought I'd share it here. If anyone is in any doubt about the activity of the community, this is a pretty good demonstration. And this is just the events I know of, I'm sure there are others in far corners of the globe I've missed.

ARTSprInt ]a[ 2012

February 13th - 17th, Vienna Austria
http://www.coactivate.org/projects/artsprint2012/project-home

This sprint is actually underway now. Topics include reoccurring events in Plone, Deco and plone.app.cmsui (which was born at the UI Sprint we hosted last year).

Die Plone Konferenz München 2012

February 22nd - 24th, Munich, Germany
http://konferenz.plone.de/

This is the first German speaking Plone conference, organised by the Munich based Plone User Group, it has three days of conference talks, plus two days of sprinting afterwards. Most of the talks will be in German and focussing on case studies and practical business Plone talks although some talks will be in English (including two of the keynotes by myself and Elizabeth Leddy).

Cioppino Sprint 2012

March 22nd - 26th, Bodega Bay, California
http://www.coactivate.org/projects/cioppino/project-home

Named after the famous fish stew from the area, this is the second Cioppino Sprint, and is focussing on Plone.org, documentation and related topics. Last year they did a fantastic job of merging the old Plone.net into Plone.org and gave a few sections on Plone.org some much needed love. This is a great sprint for those who want to get involved in the support information and structures that power our community.

World Plone Day 2012

April 25th, Worldwide
http://plone.org/events/wpd/world-plone-day-april-25th-2012

World Plone Day is a one-day event held simultaneously across the globe. Local users groups hold events in their local city to promote Plone and demonstrate it new and existing users. Last year events were held in cities from Albuquerque to Zurich and everywhere in between. If you are planning on running a World Plone Day event, then you can register your event at the link above.

Plone Open Gardens 2012

May 2nd - 4th, Sorrento Italy
http://www.abstract.it/abstract-en/initiative/plone-open-garden-2012/

Now in it's 6th year, the Plone Open Garden is a fantastic event set in the wonderful surroundings of Sorrento. This event takes the concept of an Open Space (or UnConference) and moves it outside into the sunshine. There is also a two day developer sprint afterwards. You get a combination of discussions in the garden with some of the best brains in the Plone world with amazing Italian cooking and coffee.

Plone Symposium East 2012

May 22nd - 23rd, State College, Pennsylvania, USA
http://weblion.psu.edu/symposium

Plone Symposium East is now in its 5th year. Held at Penn State University it is organised by WebLion, the colleges web development team. It combines two days of talks, two days of pre-conference training and two days of post-conference sprints. This event has a high percentage of attendees from Universities and Colleges, so ideal if you work in that sector. State College also is the home to 'Grilled Stickies' and the Berkey Creamery which produces and serves amazing ice cream.

Plone Conference 2012

October 10th - 12th, Arnhem, Netherlands
http://plone.org/news/plone-conference-2012-host-announced

This is the big one of the year. The annual Plone Conference is the biggest event in the Plone calendar and brings together over 300 people from over 30 countries together. This year Four Digits is organising the event, and from what I've seen so far it is going to be awesome. It is being held in the Musis Sacrum, home to Arnhem Philharmonic Orchestra. There will be training beforehand and sprints afterwards. More information will be coming soon on this.

Oh... and don't forget the various Python conferences going on around the world as well. There is a full list at http://pycon.org/ and a lot of the Plone community will be attending them as well. The Plone Foundation is one of the sponsors of the largest, PyCon US which is 9th - 11th March in Santa Clara, California.

'10 Lessons' Intranet Event back by popular demand

Astra Baker — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 16:10:00 +0000

On March 21st Netsight is hosting it's second half-day event '10 Lessons learned from building successful corporate intranets and portals'.

Due to the popularity of the first event we have decided to host the event again at the SS Great Britain.

Our consultants and developers will be giving talks and demonstrations based on our experiences of delivering over 200 projects from clients ranging from start-ups to multinational corporations, public sector bodies and NGOs.

This is a free event ideal for anyone involved in the implementation or management of a corporate intranet or portal, or anyone considering building an intranet.

For more information:

Download our event overview PDF

THE DATE

21st March 2012

THE PRICE

It's Free

THE VENUE

The SS Great Britain
Great Western Dockyard
Bristol
BS1 6TY

HOW TO REGISTER

Secure your place either

online

10intranetlessons.eventbrite.com

or by email

info@netsight.co.uk

(Attendees will have the opportunity to take a tour of the ship either before or after the session programme.)

Full Text Code Searching

Matt Hamilton — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 15:10:00 +0000

Last night I saw a tweet re-tweeted by David Glick about a post from one of the original guys who worked on Google Code search, Russ Cox. He has released some code for doing code search based upon the ideas used by Google Code Search.

Google shut down Google Code search recently and his code allows you to do similar hybrid index/regex searching on files locally.

I have to confess, I never really used Google Code Search. I guess probably due to until actually reading the post above I didn't realise that it could do regular expression searching. This is a 'big thing' when searching in code. I really don't know how I missed that fact.

I am a bit of a (lapsed) search and information retrieval geek myself. My final year project at university was a full text mailing list indexer/search system (similar to gmane). This was based heavily on the seminal work mentioned in Russ' post Managing Gigabytes by Witten, Moffat, and Bell and also by Modern Information Retrieval by Baeza-Yates and Ribeiro-Neto and the paper that influenced much of the internet as we know it now, Brin and Page's The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine.

Russ Cox has released the code to his tool at http://code.google.com/p/codesearch/ and you can download binaries for OSX, FreeBSD, Linux, and Windows.

Here is a quick rundown on using it to index and then search my local development directory on my Macbook. This allows me to quickly search through both all the code in the projects I'm working on, but all my egg cache, which contains all the code to Plone itself. Great for when you see a particular bit of markup, or error message and need to work out where it is coming from in the code.

Firstly download the binaries from the link above, or compile it yourself. Then you need to get it to index your directories. In my case everything I do in under /Development:

dhcp10:~ matth$ cindex /Development
2012/01/23 14:47:26 index /Development
2012/01/23 14:49:08 flush index
2012/01/23 14:49:08 merge 7 files + mem
2012/01/23 14:49:23 520694590 data bytes, 82743702 index bytes
2012/01/23 14:49:23 merge /Users/matth/.csearchindex /Users/matth/.csearchindex~
2012/01/23 14:49:39 done

And then you can use it to search through the code:

dhcp10:~ matth$ csearch "def authenticate"
/Development/buildout-cache/eggs/AccessControl-2.13.4-py2.6-macosx-10.7-x86_64.egg/AccessControl/userfolder.py:    def authenticate(self, name, password, request):
/Development/buildout-cache/eggs/AccessControl-2.13.4-py2.6-macosx-10.7-x86_64.egg/AccessControl/users.py:    def authenticate(self, password, request):
/Development/buildout-cache/eggs/AccessControl-2.13.4-py2.6-macosx-10.7-x86_64.egg/AccessControl/users.py:    def authenticate(self, password, request):
/Development/buildout-cache/eggs/Paste-1.7.5.1-py2.6.egg/paste/auth/basic.py:    def authenticate(self, environ):
/Development/buildout-cache/eggs/Paste-1.7.5.1-py2.6.egg/paste/auth/digest.py:    def authenticate(self, environ):
/Development/buildout-cache/eggs/Paste-1.7.5.1-py2.7.egg/paste/auth/basic.py:    def authenticate(self, environ):
/Development/buildout-cache/eggs/Paste-1.7.5.1-py2.7.egg/paste/auth/digest.py:    def authenticate(self, environ):
...

One current issue is there is no way to exclude directories from the index, so you get .svn directories in the results

dhcp10:~ matth$ csearch "sspi.ServerAuth"
/Development/netsight.windowsauthplugin/netsight/windowsauthplugin/windowsauthplugin/.svn/text-base/krbtest.py.svn-base:            sa = sspi.ServerAuth('Negotiate')
/Development/netsight.windowsauthplugin/netsight/windowsauthplugin/windowsauthplugin/.svn/text-base/plugin.py.svn-base:            sa = sspi.ServerAuth('Negotiate')
/Development/netsight.windowsauthplugin/netsight/windowsauthplugin/windowsauthplugin/krbtest.py:            sa = sspi.ServerAuth('Negotiate')
/Development/netsight.windowsauthplugin/netsight/windowsauthplugin/windowsauthplugin/plugin.py:            sa = sspi.ServerAuth('Negotiate')
/Development/py24nsp/sanofi/src/netsight.windowsauthplugin/netsight/windowsauthplugin/.svn/text-base/krbtest.py.svn-base:            sa = sspi.ServerAuth('Negotiate')
/Development/py24nsp/sanofi/src/netsight.windowsauthplugin/netsight/windowsauthplugin/.svn/text-base/plugin.py.svn-base:            sa = sspi.ServerAuth('Negotiate')
/Development/py24nsp/sanofi/src/netsight.windowsauthplugin/netsight/windowsauthplugin/krbtest.py:            sa = sspi.ServerAuth('Negotiate')
/Development/py24nsp/sanofi/src/netsight.windowsauthplugin/netsight/windowsauthplugin/plugin.py:            sa = sspi.ServerAuth('Negotiate')
/Development/py26nsp2/plone41demo/src/netsight.windowsauthplugin/netsight/windowsauthplugin/.svn/text-base/krbtest.py.svn-base:            sa = sspi.ServerAuth('Negotiate')
/Development/py26nsp2/plone41demo/src/netsight.windowsauthplugin/netsight/windowsauthplugin/.svn/text-base/plugin.py.svn-base:            sa = sspi.ServerAuth('Negotiate')
/Development/py26nsp2/plone41demo/src/netsight.windowsauthplugin/netsight/windowsauthplugin/krbtest.py:            sa = sspi.ServerAuth('Negotiate')
/Development/py26nsp2/plone41demo/src/netsight.windowsauthplugin/netsight/windowsauthplugin/plugin.py:            sa = sspi.ServerAuth('Negotiate')

You can however restrict the search to a path (regex):

dhcp10:~ matth$ csearch -f /Development/py26nsp/cplonline/src/netsight.cpl "def auth"
/Development/py26nsp/cplonline/src/netsight.cpl/netsightcpl/.svn/text-base/models.py.svn-base:    def authenticate(self, password):
/Development/py26nsp/cplonline/src/netsight.cpl/netsightcpl/models.py:    def authenticate(self, password):

As it can take regular expressions, you can do more advanced searches, e.g. 'all methods that take an argument called password':

dhcp10:~ matth$ csearch -f /Development/py26nsp/cplonline/src/netsight.cpl "def.*\(.*password"
/Development/py26nsp/cplonline/src/netsight.cpl/netsightcpl/__init__.py:def fetchandload(ftpcmd, loadcmd, ftpcache, host, user, password):
/Development/py26nsp/cplonline/src/netsight.cpl/netsightcpl/evidence.py:    def __init__(self, uri, user=None, password=None):
/Development/py26nsp/cplonline/src/netsight.cpl/netsightcpl/models.py:    def __init__(self, name, login, password, company_id, role=None):
/Development/py26nsp/cplonline/src/netsight.cpl/netsightcpl/models.py:    def _hash_password(self, password, salt):
/Development/py26nsp/cplonline/src/netsight.cpl/netsightcpl/models.py:    def set_password(self, password):
/Development/py26nsp/cplonline/src/netsight.cpl/netsightcpl/models.py:    def authenticate(self, password):
/Development/py26nsp/cplonline/src/netsight.cpl/netsightcpl/tests/base.py:    def login(self, login='admin', password='admin'):

So thanks to Russ for releasing this. It certainly is much quicker for search through large directories of code than using grep or ack

How To Shoot Yourself in the Foot With Social Media

Matt Hamilton — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 17:35:00 +0000

Last week, a Content Management System vendor ran a seminar on how to select a content management system.

The Webinar was entitled "Choosing Between Open Source and Commercial CMS: Options and Implications". The vendor in question is a commercial CMS vendor, so there is no guessing which way the discussion was going to be slanted.

But actually, despite this company being pulled up before over the FUD in the marketing it produces, and this webinar being much the same, this is not actually the point of this blog post.

I went to join the webinar to see what they were going to say, and the first thing that struck me was that they required the user to install RealPlayer to watch the webinar. RealPlayer?! Really?! Those of you that have ever used RealPlayer in the past will know what a pain it is. There is a good reason why pretty much everyone switched to Flash-based video delivery about a decade ago.

Every minute or so RealPlayer decided that in fact I wanted to listen to 'blank.gif' instead and I had to repeatedly start again to get it to play. Oh and the slides stuck on the first slide of the webinar and never advanced.

It seems I was not alone, as looking at the twitter hashtag for the event #cmsselected the main discussion was on how the webinar platform was failing. There were a few Open Source advocates whom were trying to correct some of the FUD. But there was no discussion at all about the content of the webinar. Throughout the webinar the hosts repeatedly encouraged discussion on Twitter, yet clearly they were not paying any attention to what was going on. They were blindly going on without any attempt to feed back any of the backchannel concerns into the presentation or even acknowledge and apologise for the failings of their chosen platform.

It was a bit like a teacher carrying on at the blackboard not aware that the entire classroom had given up listening and was just laughing at the teacher's choice of clothing.

So, social media is a great tool. I've been on many webinars, interviews and podcasts in which it has been a fantastic backchannel for communication amongst the audience. Hosts that monitor these back channels (Scott Liewehr on CMSConnected, and Randal Schwartz on FLOSS Weekly are good examples) and feed these questions in gain great trust from the audience. They are empowering them to contribute to the webinar and turn it from merely a one-way presentation to a true discussion.

Those that don't just lose the respect of the audience.

Report from Online Information 2011

Matt Hamilton — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 15:59:14 +0000

Last week, Netsight were at the Online Information 2011 expo in London. This is a big expo focussed at online information providers and management. There are a lot of information professionals and librarians there, and a lot of vendors selling both sources of information and tools to manage the information (Content Management, Search, etc.)

The show this year moved to a more compact venue, the National Hall at Olympia, which is slightly smaller than the previous Grand Hall location they used. This has actually been a good thing, as there are slightly fewer stands, and a higher density of people wandering about. Again this year there is a parallel running conference and many people from the conference are coming down to the expo to have a look around the stands.

Netsight have been maning a Plone stand again this year. We have been handing out Plone brochures, and chatting to people about Plone and putting them in touch with local Plone companies if they are from abroad. About 20-30% of the people we talk to on the stand are not from the UK.

We had some great neighbours at the show with a creative design agency from Manchester, Mickey & Mallory next door to us. Sarah, their MD, did a fantastic talk alongside Ed Fay from the London School of Economics about their new digital library project based on the Open Source repository software Fedora Commons which in a nice piece of serendipity uses Plone for their website.

We have also been giving demos of Plone itself and showing people some of the add-ons for Plone such as Linguaplone which always impresses people. I still get a kick out of setting the language to Arabic in Firefox and watching Plone translate its interface and switch to right-to-left mode.

We must have given out around 150 Plone brochures to people and collected the contact details of those wanting more information or wanting further demos later on.

Unlike previous years, I don't think I had a single person ask 'So what is Open Source then?'. I guess this year finally most people know about Open Source and the majority of it understand the main aspects of it. One of the most common questions now is 'So it's kinda like Wordpress/Joomla/Drupal?'. Our general answer to questions like that focus on the aspects of Plone which really make it stand out from the competitors which are the workflow, user management, and local roles. Yes if you want a simple site then Wordpress might be the tool for the job for you, but if you have a large number of content creators and you need to manage their rights and roles throughout a site and perhaps workflow their contributions then Plone wins hands down.

It was also a chance to chat to others in the general content management industry and good to catch up briefly with Real Story Group analyst Theresa Regli who was giving a keynote talk on "Search and content management trends for 2012 and beyond". One of the interesting tidbits from her talk was that in the world of Enterprise Search more and more customers are asking 'Why NOT Open Source [search]?' rather than 'WHY Open Source [search]?', which is showing how far Open Source in general has come in terms of being accepted in the enterprise.

I also got a chance to chat to Brian Teeman, co-founder of Joomla!, who stopped by the stand for a chat. Most of the chat was focussed on business models of Open Source. There are a number of Open Source vendors at Online Information (Hippo, Squiz, a few Drupal companies) whom are Open Source by license, but whose business model generally revolves around one single large dominant vendor of their software. With both Plone and Joomla! the community is pretty level with no 800 pound Gorilla of a company in the community.... and we'd like to both keep it that way. I'm glad when pitching Plone to prospective clients that I don't have to worry about competing against the professional services division of the software I'm trying to pitch.

Again this year, I was also speaking in one of the show-floor theatres. This year however the theatres were open sided, which meant more people could just stop by when wanding past and listen for a few moments about whatever we being spoken about. My talk was fairly well attended with only a couple of empty seats. Originally my talk was due to be done in conjunction with a client of ours, but alas she was unable to attend, so I did the full talk myself.

A slidecast of my talk is available on Slideshare now and embedded below:

Online Information 2011: Global and Social A case study of the implementation of a large-scale social intranet

So, all in all a pretty successful show. Next year Online Information will move out to the docklands to the ExCeL centre and will change its format to merge both the conference and the expo into one combined ticket price.

We're off to Online Information 2011

Matt Hamilton — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 17:35:00 +0000

Once again we will be shortly heading off to Online Information 2011 in London. On Monday we will be packing up the van with all the Plone goodies and heading up to set up the stand. The expo is held at Earls Court Olympia in the National Hall from Tues 29th Nov to Thurs 1st Dec.

If you want to come along and find out more about Plone, one of the leading Open Source Content Management systems, then come drop by for a chat. Entrance to the expo is free if you register online in advance.

The Plone stand will be stand 722, and we will be on hand to give demos of Plone 4 and discuss whether Plone might be the right solution for you.

On Wednesday at 14:30, I'll be giving a talk along with Rebecca Wilkins, Communication Executive, Belron International on Global and social: a case study of the implementation of a large-scale social intranet.

In this talk we will show how a large, multinational organisation has overcome the common concerns relating to social media in the enterprise, including governance, loss of control and the risks of reliance on services outside the firewall. Once these concerns are mitigated, the social media model can be used to drive employee engagement and increase effective communication across the business.

So we hope to see you there, come by and have a chat!

Matt Hamilton elected as President of the Plone Foundation

Astra Baker — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 16:50:00 +0000

Matt Hamilton, Technical Director at Netsight has been named President of the Plone Foundation for the coming year. Matt has already served time on the Plone Foundation board and this is his 5^th term as an officer for the foundation. He served on the Plone Foundation Board in 2004, 2009, and 2010 before becoming Vice President of the Board in 2011. Officers are elected by the seven board members.

Matt is responsible for the technical consulting and training that Netsight undertakes. He was the technical consultant for various large commercial intranet projects, and specialises in integration, authentication and performance optimisation.

Matt has been active in the Zope community since 2000 and in the Plone community since 2003. He has been involved in various aspects of Plone's technology, as a developer, bug fixer, and integrator. He also has actively marketed Plone and has introduced it to many organizations that traditionally have not considered Open Source an option.

Following his election as President of the foundation Matt spoke about some of the future plans for Plone and what he hopes to achieve this year:

"I am very excited to be working with the most diverse Plone Foundation board we have ever had, with members from six different countries over three continents. Plone has just turned 10 this year and has proved itself to be one of the most enduring, and capable content management systems out there.

This year I really want to push forward building on the work of the previous board in terms of marketing Plone and building stronger relationships with the wider Python, Open Source, and Content Management communities. We have an exciting year ahead with the landing of several major and exciting technologies in the 4.x and 5.x roadmap.

Diazo, the new theming engine for Plone has made Plone once again one of the easiest CMS in the world to theme; Dexterity is moving content type creation away from being solely a developer task to that of a power user; and Deco is redefining how we think of a 'page' and how we manage content.

The Plone community is expanding ever more with a record number of new contributors in the past year. I'm looking forward to being a part of Plone as is goes into its second decade!"

The other officers nominated onto the Plone Foundation board are, Vice-President - Carol Ganz from Six Feet Up, Secretary - Paul Roeland currently working for the Clean Clothes Campaign in Amsterdam and Treasurer - Jen Myers also from Six Feet Up in the US.

Plone: The DNA of a Successful Open Source Community

Matt Hamilton — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 16:00:00 +0000

Today I gave a talk at the University of Bristol on the DNA of a Successful Open Source Community.

Originally this was going to be a talk just on tools and techniques etc that you didn't get taught at University and that you will need in the real world, but I thought that might end up a bit dry. So decided instead to talk about the symbiotic relationship between an SME (Netsight) and an Open Source Community (Plone). I highlight some of the amazing aspects of the Plone Community and how they interweave with running a company.

A slidecast for this talk with the recorded audio is available below or at http://www.slideshare.net/hammertoe/plone-the-dna-of-a-successful-open-source-community

View another webinar from Matt Hamilton

Plone Conference 2011 Nearly Here!

Matt Hamilton — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 09:40:30 +0100

With just over two weeks to go, the annual Plone Conference is nearly upon us. It is not too late to buy your ticket and attend if you have not done so already. At US$350 it represents amazing value for a conference.

This year the conference is being held in San Francisco on the 3rd-6th November, and even counting airfare and hotel, you will not find a better, more cost-effective way to brush up on your Plone skills, meet other Plone developers and users, and see what the rest of the community is up to.

I know that in the current economic climate, training and conference budget is hard to come by, especially if you have to tell your boss that you have the hardship of a stay in glorious San Francisco for it. But if you consider that you will have the choice of 118 different talks, plus the opportunity to get structured training at the training workshops before the conference with a choice of five great to-day courses ranging on topics from theming to content type creation; it really is a no-brainer.

If you have attended a Plone Conference beforeyou will know of the energy and intensity of the event, if you've never attended one, then please do come along. The Plone community is one of the most welcoming developer communities you will ever meet, and you will get a chance to meet people from all industries in public, private. and NGO sectors. Come and hear tals such as 'Beginner mistakes, Expert Failures' by Alan Runyan on of the Plone co-founders; or 'Dexterity in the Wild: Technical case study of a complex Dexterity-based integration' by David Glick, one of the core developers.

If you want to get a flavour of the talks, then take a look at the videos of the talks from last year's conference.

I look forward to seeing you there!

For more information about the conference, head over to the conference website: http://ploneconf.org/