bin/instance stop: Bye Bye Plone
The real end of an era; Today is the day we archived and stopped our last Plone instance: the knowledge base application for our customer Humanitas. The application has run over 11 years and now it’s time to pull the plug. Four Digits & Plone have a rich history together.
What started it all
In 2007 Four Digits was still starting up, the young new company was working with Coherence, it's own Python based Content Management System. To broaden its horizon Maarten and Martijn visited the Plone Conference 2007 in Napels Italy. Impressed and excited, they came back with very good stories about Plone, an open source CMS made in Python. Soon we had determined to make this part of our technology stack.
Four Digits x Open Source
In the time since, Four Digits has always given a lot of support and love to this open source product in the form of code, organising events, giving talks at conferences, writing documentation, developing add-ons and sharing knowledge. Something that now, in 2024 is still the DNA of the company. We are now doing this in the Wagtail, Django and Python communities. Great things never change!
Thinking back about the great memories
In the early days, think for example of Maarten's talk at the Plone Conference 2008 in Washington how you can build a Plone from a PSD in 1 hour then, or how we realized TinyMCE as default editor in Plone. Then we put more and more love and time into this project, from visiting and organising Sprints, contributing to essenstial core code, organising user days in Arnhem and developing popular addons. And as icing on the cake we got to organize the Plone Conference in 2012 in the Musis Sacrum, in our home town Arnhem. A project to never forget. It's to much to mention in one blog, you'll find a trip down memory lane in our blogs.
Made friends
Plone was also social platform for making new friends. For instance we've both met Kees Hink and Coen van der Kamp because of Plone. Both gentlemen are longtime employees of Four Digits. Maybe that would never have happened otherwise? Who knows?
Grateful
Four Digits used to provide Plone services, but some time ago we consciously changed our technology stack towards more Python, Django and Wagtail CMS, just as we had changed to Plone back in 2007.
Since then we managed to help a lot of our customers and new ones migrating to Django based solutions. Read the page if you are looking for more information about our migration services. All things come to an end, including the Plone adventures of Four Digits. Everyone we met on this ride, thank you for the interesting conversations and we look forward to seeing you in the future. We are grateful for the memories and are now truly Plone-less.
