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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. ;)

Yesterday was World Plone Day, a series of events held around the globe to promote Plone and Open Source in general. In my role as one of the directors of the Plone Foundation I was kindly invited by Jonathan Camilleri Bowman of 2i Ltd to come and present at their World Plone Day event in Valletta, Malta. Needless to say, it was an offer I jumped at, as it was a chance to visit Malta, somewhere I've never been before, but also a chance to see how Plone was being used by a central government.

Malta is an interesting place with a mix of Mediterranean and British cultures. They drive on the correct side of the road (left), their road signs are in English, and their buses and lorries all beautiful old vintage British Leylands, Bristols and AECs. And yet, their buildings are all low, limestone rendered structures, many only half finished in that typical relaxed Mediterranean style. There are something like 360 churches across the island, wherever you are you can see one. Oh, and the sun shines and of course there are beaches everywhere. Maltese is a mix of Arabic and Italian.. with smatterings of pretty much every other language in there. As Jonathan told me: 'Pretty much everyone has invaded Malta at some time'.

Today Malta has a population of about 400,000 people (approx the same size as the city of Bristol) and its main industries are shipping (many large container ships stop to refuel and reload here), finance and tourism. Since Malta joined the EU in 2004, it has been seen as a very favorable location for business due to its adoption of the Euro, its official second language of English, and its welcoming tax rates.

The World Plone day event organised by 2i was aimed specifically at the public sector here in Malta, and was held in the Chamber of Commerce in the capitol city of Valetta. There were both delegates and speakers from various government departments, including the opening address by Mr Claudio Grech chairman of MITA, the Malta Information Technology Agency. MITA is the prime agency appointed by the government to implement ICT on its behalf and reports directly to the Minister of Communications.

I was presenting two talks, one a case study on the Kent Connects Portals project, and talking about their Open Source 'journey' starting with discovering Plone and using it out of the box, through to engaging 3rd party support and development as the project grew. The second talk I did was on the Plone Community -- one of Plone's great strengths. I covered the vast array of support out their available for Plone from one-to-one training, to conferences, sprints, Plone Bootcamps, books, irc channel etc. When I was first proposing my talk, I was a bit worried I wouldn't have enough material to cover half an hour of a talk, but once you look at how wide the community is and what is going on, you realise just how much support for Plone there is out there. Of course, I also covered the Plone Foundation and its role within the community to promote and protect Plone and offer some of the aspects that many Open Source projects lack, such as marketing support, legal help and trademark protection.

There were also talks by Mr Michel Bugeja from the Government Enterprise Architecture Unit and from Mr Cedric Mallia of the Government Quality Assurance Unit talking about Plone and Open Source respectively. Every single government IT project has to pass through these two departments to be vetted, so to have representatives from both of them speaking at this event shows very strong support for both Plone and Open Source in general in Malta. Mr Karl Pullicino presented a case study of Plone's use in the Office of the Prime Minister.

The total attendance was about 70 people, an amazing turn out for such a targeted event. My hat goes off to 2i's team in organising this, I know I might struggle to get 70 government officials to attend a Plone seminar in London, let alone such a compact country as Malta.

The evening before, Jonathan had been telling me of the dominant position of Microsoft in the country. Every student can buy the entire Microsoft suite including tools such as Visual Studio for about GBP 7. And as you'd might expect the majority of the systems in government are based on Microsoft technologies. Earlier in the day, he pointed out Paul Allen's yacht, Octopus, in the bay dwarfing the battlements and stone walls surrounding it. Hrmm....

This however makes it all the more interesting to see Plone being used in such a Microsoft-centric environment. Many people still believe that Open Source and proprietary software are mutually exclusive in an organisation. At a conference I was at in Manchester earlier in the month, Simon Phipps, Sun's Chief Open Source Officer commented on how he never understood people when they said 'We don't use Open Source, we are a Microsoft shop'. Surely people should be using the most appropriate tools for the job?

2i is a very good example of using the best tools for the job. They have historically been a 'Microsoft shop' and are a Microsoft Certified (soon to be Gold) Partner, and they develop in some of the most traditional bastions of commercial software, the likes of business intelligence and reporting. Yet when looking at content management, they got tired of not being able to do what they wanted with Sharepoint and started to look around and found Plone. Plone has offered them a way to provide the functionality that their clients need regardless of the platform or existing technologies they are using.

After the WPD event and a quick tour around Malta, I was invited by Michel Bugeja along to a Plone users group hosted by MITA at their offices. Again, a very well attended event with about 20 people from MITA there to discuss specific questions about Plone. Topics ranged from load balancing, and setting up a ZEO cluster behind a Microsoft ISA server, integration with Malta's central authentication, aggregating searches from external systems and communicating via SOAP to other .NET systems. There were also questions about more community oriented aspects of Plone, such as how to go about finding others interested in what you might be developing and how to release a product you have developed into the community.

So the end result was an amazing couple of events in Malta, really showing a lot of support for Plone and showing it in use at the national government level. I'm looking forward to seeing, and hopefully be involved in, Plone's use increasing even further both in Malta, in the UK and of course across the globe. After all... that what we set out to achieve with World Plone Day.