Last week I attended Plonecon in Washington D.C. We use Plone quite a bit at NREL, and I wanted to
come up to speed on the state of the art, and see if I could find some folks to collaborate with on the Scientific Data Management front. I was not only surprised by the number of people in attendance, but also by the progress being made in forefront of Plone development.
Of course, one of the big news items was what is known in the community as the “Plone tax”, which is a reference to the 30+ seconds it takes to start Plone. It was announced that this has been reduced to 6 seconds, which in my mind is still too much, but I am glad they are making progress in this area. [edit] I believe the speedups were achieved in the trunk of plone, not for 3.2. Plone 3.2 is supposed to be all eggs, which I think is a great benefit to the community. I have already been using Plone in this manner with Repoze, which packaged Plone as an egg a few months ago.
I was impressed by the changes to the user interface which were proposed by Alexander Limi in his talk on the future of Plone’s user experience. It looks like portlet/viewlet terminology is being supplanted with the term “widget” which I think is more standard in the web design world. I think the new user interface is more intuitive, simplifying the page down to those components which will be most important, while still making available all of the functionality of Plone.
I was also impressed with Kapil Thangavelu’s content mirror. While I don’t think his project which takes Plone content and injects it into an sql database will be immediately useful to me, I think it offers a nice path for someone who wants to convert their Zope/Plone site over to an relational-database based site. It also provides a nice bridge for someone who wants to use existing relational database tools to mine data penned up within a zope database.
Coming from a TG background, I was of course interested in Repoze. Chris McDonough gave a compelling talk on repoze, specifically repoze.bfg and what is motivation was for creating yet another framework. We ran a BOF together, and had quite a bit of response. I demo’d using Toscawidgets within Plone (running on repoze.plone).
Craig Swank and I also demo’d one of our repoze.plone application for a group of people interested in laboratory informatics systems. I started up a google group for this, and I sincerely hope that our small community can find a way to collaborate efforts in order to increase our productivity in a way only OSS can.