Plone Metrics Person of the Year

Its New Year's Eve and time to announce Plone Metrics Person of the Year, the person deemed most influential* in the past year. The 2008 winner of this prestigious award, garnering all the rights and privileges pertaining thereto,** is Joel Burton.

I'd heard Joel's presentation back in Seattle in 2006 and had the good fortune to take his Theming Plone 3 Bootcamp in DC ahead of the 2008 Conference. And in this regard, Joel is merely the standard bearer for all the incredible Plone trainers out there who are not only great instructors, but advocating every day for Plone. His endless patience, good humor, and powerful presentation make his training seminars top notch.

But on top of that, Joel has provided a web interface to Archetypes generation with his online UML site. Its this tool that has allowed me to effectively use Plone and Zope as a means of introducing students to object-oriented databases and data-driven web services.

Instead of spending time getting students comfortable with Python so that they can run ArchGenXML, we concentrate on ArgoUML models and leave the software flags to Mr. Burton. In practically no time students have installed a local version of Plone on their systems and designed a functional customization to be delivered via the Web.

Its that kind of tool that takes something good (ArchGenXML) and turns it into something approachable by the masses, makes it truly useable. For being an outstanding Plone instructor and for giving us uml.joelburton.com, Plone Metrics is pleased to award Joel Burton the Plone Metrics Person of the Year Award.

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* At least from my limited and very personal point of view.

** I'll buy the winners a beer when we're next in the same time zone.