The document discusses the history and current state of the Plone content management system (CMS) and its open source community. It describes how Plone originated from Zope in 1998 and has the oldest living open source CMS. While the ecosystem has found its niche, the community is an organic mix of small consultancies rather than a single leader. The document also notes that Plone may be difficult to grow a business around solely but that its advanced plugin system and permissions make it suitable for medium-large organizations with complex needs. Overall, it portrays the Plone community as battle-scarred but friendly and one that attracts intelligent people and happens everywhere.

1. Beauty of
the beast
Mikko Ohtamaa
Plone Conference 2013
@moo9000

2. Agenda
★ How Plone happens
★ Why I started doing Plone
★ Why I stopped doing Plone

3. opensourcehacker.com
Open Source Hacker
mikko@redinnovation.com
moo9000

4. Oldest living open
source CMS*
★ Zope 1998
★ Plone 2000
★ Plone Foundation
2004
*) unless claimed otherwise

5. Zope2/Startup/misc/zpasswd.py:
Copyright (C) 1999, 2000 Digital Creations, Inc.
Guido
van
Rossum
trying
to
learn
Python

6. There is no one on the
driver’s seat
The community is an organic
mash up of small consulting
shops having beer* with public
sector IT departments
*) sometimes a caiprinha or two

7. 2003 Nokia did user
interface testing
of Series 40
phones with
Python scripting
A nuclear blast
proof phone
Microsoft

9. €€€

10. Many many beers ago in
galaxy far away
Ploneconf 2007 - Napoli
Having
a PC

12. Everybody
loves
Plone
♥

13. (except
developers)
(ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻

14. Solving right problems wrong
Python
View
Viewlet Manager
Viewlets
TAL
HTML
DOM / lxml
Diazo XML
XSLT
Component
LookupError
WTF ??? Robot
Git

15. Plone is not attractive
★ Everybody who is not making money
out of Plone doesn’t want to touch it
★ Ecosystem has found its niche,
but it is not growing

16. ★ It’s hard to grow your business if
Plone is core of your business
★ I could work forever as a consultant
alone, but meh

17. Travel to Brazil
- forget the sh*t

18. localbitcoins.com/p/opensourcehacker
By some bitcoins from me with reals!

19. There is unexplained
beauty in
Plone the community

20. Plone has only 1 feature
★There is no thing it cannot do
★ Most advanced plugin system ever
written in any programming language
★ Most advanced permission, role and
sharing system which bends so you
don’t have to

21. Battle-scarred community
★ Old enough to look into a mirror and
admit the mistakes of the past
★ Most friendly community
★ No question goes unanswered ... but
you might regret asking
“We were young.
We needed the money.”

22. Plone community
attracts most intelligent
and interesting people...

23. ...and happens everywhere
Doing Plone logo at the swamp of a sunken
city somewhere in Argentina

24. ★ Ugliest legacy codebase
★ Not having smart enough living
person to fix your bug
★ No one caring about us
...still...
Even with...

25. Plone is the best CMS
for medium-large scale
organizations with 15+
editors, several subsites
and complex workflow
needs

26. Plone rocks like no other
community on this planet

27. opensourcehacker.com Open Source Hacker
mikko@redinnovation.commoo9000