Plone conference 10-26-06: State of Plone Keynote
Last night to my great offense (at the time) some one asked me if I was finding the conference to be too technical. In the world of l33t, a front end Web developer is usually barely considered technical and certainly never considered a real programmer (compared to say a Python person) and a female front end developer is even lower on the “geek scale”. (Don’t get me started about pay rates.) So I was wondering at the time that if I had been a male front end developer would I have been asked that question?
After the listening to today’s delightfully schizophrenic keynote, I think the answer would have been, for once, yes. One of the main things I took away was that the Plone community (meaning primarily the developers and the Plone Foundation members) have reached a level a maturity where marketing has become an important topic. Plone is stable, has a solid reputation, has a clear development direction and roadmap, has a base of 200 developers, is now trademarked and the foundation has finally gained official (U.S. non-profit status). So what is missing? Full market reach though a strong marketing message that appeals to business. It’s a big concern – speaking the business language rather than the technical language. So the question on the mind of those involved in furthering Plone’s CMS market share seems to be: Are we speaking the right language? Is the conference too geeky to appeal to businesses? And as a representative of business (BMC was listed on one of the keynote slides under Corporate adopters) I’m a logical person to ask.
So here’s a brain dump of notes from the keynote of stuff I want to remember.
Plone is now five years old!
Plone 3 quick look (there will be a talk on this tomorrow with more details)
- Versioning and staging
- Portlet engine
- Rules engine
- OpenID
Plone 3.5 ideas
- Improved member handling
- Improved media handling (good!)
- Improved doc management (BLOB support) (yay!)
- More flexible themes
- Separate content production (yay!)
Various gossip
- Limi is going to Google as an interface designer. Good for him! Good for Google!
- All Plone consultants are busy – zero capacity left.
- “Plone makes money.”
Other stuff:
As part of the need for a strong marketing message, the Plone Foundation needs a way to track the number of sites using Plone. They are exploring a mechanism to do this.
Plone Foundation needs help with stats analysis.
There’s an initiative to organize Add on products including ratings, dev resources, etc. This is what the weekend Sprints are about.
Plone.net lists providers, case studies, media mentions, Plone sites. I need to login and add our sites.
