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Plone conference 10-25-06: Morning sessions

October 25, 2006 at 1:27 pm (Uncategorized)

Oh my poor neglected blog. Well I finally have the opportunity to write a bit!

I’m in Seattle at the Plone Conference and will make notes here for my co-workers and friends who didn’t get to attend. So since this is me… it’s going to be a lot about social activity and connections and a bit of a brain dump of  detailed technical info gleaned from the sessions to remind myself later of what I learned.

Misc notes: It was mentioned that some of the rooms (Shaw and Lopez Wed and Thursday, Olympia room Friday) will be video recorded but unfortunately the other talks will not be audio recorded like they were at the symposium. I’m pretty bummed about that. Jon Stahl says they are going for quality over quantity.

9am

Welcome & Icebreaker

Jon Stahl gave a Chock Full o’ Love talk and then forced us all stand up repeatedly (oh the horror). This actually turned out quite interesting as he asked people from different segments to stand (business, research, education, non-profit, consultants). I was surpised at the number of business users which seemed higher than I expected as I still expect early adopters of Open Source software to come from non-profit and education.

Jon then went on to make us do a meet and greet game which would normally make my skin crawl but turned out to be quite lovely. This involved picking a partner and torturing them. OK not really – Jon would announce a question then we each have a minute to answer. (On re-reading this it seems like I’m portraying Jon as a bully which not in any way the case – everyone seemed to be enjoying his talk greatly and were more than happy to do whatever he wanted and were in no way frightened into submission by the rumored guy with the cow bell.)

So my partner was from Amsterdam and I can’t remember his name (Paul?) due to my lack of appropriate caffeine intake at that time. So I’ll call him Cool Guy from Amsterdam (CGA). CGA works on for a non-profit with 80K members world wide. I was able to pick his brain quite a bit about their use of lingua plone … more on LinguaPlone later. The thing I found most interesting was his answer to the question – What are your goals at the Plone con? He said that he wanted to hook up with other non-profits so that they could share specialized products focused on the needs of this type of organization. That made me think… hmmm… Good idea… I need to hook up with other corporate geeks who are using plone.

Enter Jeff Watts from National Instruments! Jeff looked familar and I realized Tom Parish and I had met him at the one day blogging conference we went to in Austin. Jeff told me that they used our site TalkBMC in order to sell a plone implementation at NI. How cool is that? I’m going to email Jeff in a bit as I’d like to talk more about how they are using Plone over there.

As Jeff and I were talking, the wonderful Myroslav Opyr from QuintaGroup came up! (Hey Tom – I’m on MOs agenda for Friday evening to go over my list so let me know if you think of anything else to mention.) Then Sean Kelly walked up and turns out he’s from Texas too (Allen which is near Dallas) and hosts his sites with QG. Sean is a Plone consultant. Big love fest over QG services ensued. I need to write them a testamonial for them.

10:30

Member and Remember: Advanced Member Management in Plone 2.5

I didn’t have access until the 11:20 session so I wrote a small page of notes which I’ll brain dump here. Rob Miller gave this talk and stepped on my brain a bit. I didn’t mind at all. What a smart guy. Scott – this is one you’ll want to watch. A good session just wish the slides had bigger fonts. Rob is great fun. Here’s some quick and possibly incoherent notes to remind me of the talk:

Membrane is used to create highly custom membership relationships

Remember is the implementation of membrane and is a more complete solution. It uses default plone member features. The beta will be released in 4 weeks.

There will be a migration piece to move from CMF member to Remember for Plone 2.5. Remember does not convert default plone membership yet.

B-Org is membrane based as well and has properties fro departments, employees and projects.

11:20

Graduating from Spagetti to Sushi: Plone for PHPers

Spirited talk from Sean Kelly who I was able to talk to briefly after the Icebreaker session. This is a real geek out PHP session – Alysia you would love it. Man I’m really glad this is being recorded. He’s going on quite a bit on how much PHP sucks which is hilarious – nice slide set too. Oh wow he just talked about doing something quickly and pleasing management and getting asked for more and more till it all blows up. ha! This talk is cracking me up. Alysia and Scott – this is definitely one to watch although I’m not sure how quickly they’ll get the video up.

Sean is now mixing cocktails! Excellent – I’ve picked the right session! He threatened to card me… that was pretty cool. lol. Cocktails were tasty.

OK that’s it for the morning sessions. Off to lunch.