Plone Conference 2013

With a conference come many interesting talks that introduce new technologies and/or show off interesting use cases. These made me stand in awe at the power of Plone. As someone said, Plone has only one feature: There’s nothing it can’t do. High availability, high traffic, many users, intranets, websites, integration with other software: It’s all there. Great to see it being used so well worldwide.

Also, there was talk of the future, near (Plone 5) and far (2020). Nowhere will you ever find so many programmers in a room discussing the future as at a PloneConf. Strangely enough, this rarely leads to chaos, quite the opposite.

One of the more interesting discussions, i think, is the tendency to use the plone.api in Plone’s core code. This makes for more uniform code, in the sense that we will promote “there’s only one way to do it”. This will also make learning Plone less confusing for new developers. As an added bonus, it would make it possible to refactor parts of Plone’s code without breaking things.

There’s a lot more to be discussed, and then to be coded. We will work on Plone 5 during the Arnhem Sprint, November 11th-15th. Many of the people involved heavily with Plone 5 have already pledged their attendance.

What also captivitated all of us, i think i can say, is the spirit of Plone’s community. It is full of enthousiastic developers, who take their job seriously while at the same enjoying the work, the contact with people spread out across the globe. Our last day in Brasilia was spent sprinting (and discussing) with these great folks.

What also made this conference special was that it was held together with PyCon Brazil. This mix was very interesting to us, as we got more of an idea what the rest of the Python world is up to. It must have made things harder for the organizers to deal with so many people (~500), but they battled through with flair, and I’d like to thank them for a great week!