Reflections on Plone and PyCon 2010

I returned a few weeks ago from PyCon to a full Inbox and a number of projects that needed attention, and have only now set aside the time to reflect upon the conference.

First of all, if you work with Plone or any other Python software, you should absolutely make the effort to go to PyCon. I can’t think of any better way to discover new technologies and techniques. It is one thing to read about something online, and quite another for the core developer to explain to you directly how something works.

If Django is a pony then Zope is a dark horse

“Dark horse “a term used to describe a little-known person or thing that emerges to prominence.

There was only talk that listed Zope in the title and it was canceled for some unknown reason.  However, there were no less than 5 additional talks that were either Zope related projects (2 for Plone), or were discussions that showcased technologies such as zope.interface or repoze.bfg. It still seems to be the case that Zope was/is ahead of its time, but still suffers from its reputation (much of it no longer relevant) and lack of successful mind-share marketing.  Hopefully the BlueBream effort will address some of this.

Plone cheerleading

There was a sizable Plone presence as witnessed when we all wore our WPD shirt.

Plone was also the only open source project (non-commercial) to have a booth at PyCon. Guido was standing by, looking inquisitive when this photo was snapped, perhaps surprised by the fact that we couldn’t even fit everyone in the booth space.

Sprints

As mentioned earlier, one of the great things about PyCon is the learning opportunity.  For the sprint I worked on porting one of my own TurboGears projects to repoze.bfg. As I was working next to the repoze.bfg authors,  I was able to make progress and have questions answered in a way that is not really possible outside of a sprint context.  If you are using Plone, but looking for something lightweight for a web app and still want to reuse skills you have gained in the Zope world, I would strongly recommend looking at repoze.bfg.  It also has excellent documentation, in both online and dead tree formats.