"Count what is countable. Measure what is measureable. What is not measureable, make measureable." -- Galileo

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Plone Takes Packt Prize


Plone has taken top honors in Packt Publishing's 2008 Best Other Open Source CMS category. "Other" refers to non-PHP CMS. Extensibility, support for non-functional requirements, and ease of setup were key to Plone's success.

Plone surpassed the other finalists, dotCMS, DotNetNuke, mojoPortal, and Umbraco, to come away with a $2000 first prize. Thank you, Packt!

The overall CMS winner will be announced this Friday Oct. 31 (Halloween).

Monday, October 27, 2008

Congratulations, Martin!

Packt Publishing rolled out its inaugural 2008 Open Source CMS Most Valuable People list today. Martin Aspeli of the Plone Community carried the flag for Plone. From the Packt MVP list:

"I am just amazed at his contributions from writing code, writing a book on Plone Development, answering questions on the mailing list."

"His tireless development for the project, his support in the mailing lists/forums, and his documentation for the project not only on plone.org"
Congratulations to all the hard-working MVPs on all the systems. This is truly a remarkable affirmation of all that Open Source can be.

Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Plone Events

Jean Jordaan had a posting over on plone.user inquiring how to estimate the size of the Plone community. I've dug through the Events archive at Plone.org and put together a table summarizing all the sprints, conferences, and symposia since Jan. 2003. I'm still missing attendance data, so anyone who knows how many Plonistas turned up at a particular event, please update the spreadsheet.

Below is a graph that shows the cumulative number of events over time. It seems to have a nice 2nd order polynomial curve to it. The breakdown by year is:







2003 6
2004 6
2005 9
2006 11
2007 12
2008 11










Tuesday, October 21, 2008

Plone Indicators

Last March Jeff Whatcott put together an insightful set of graphics for Drupal. Some of these stats have been watched on this blog, but there are some new ones. Someone over at the Plone boards on Nabble suggested that the Plone community do the same. Here goes...

How Often Do People Search for Plone on Google?
Plone = blue, Drupal = red, Wordpress = green, Joomla = orange



Back in 2003, Plone was the leader of the (very small) CMS pack. Search volume has been declining since mid-2005. 2006 was a good year for Plone in the news.

How Often Do People Mention Plone on Twitter?
There have been no tweets recently. (Curious, because I saw conference tweets in DC.)

How Often Do People Mention Plone on Blogs?
Posts that contain Plone per day for the last 30 days.
Technorati Chart

How Many Job Postings Mention Plone?

Very periodic, but also trending upwards nicely.

plone Job Trends graph




plone Job Trendsplone jobs

However, when compared with other heavy-hitter CMS...


How Do Plone Jobs Pay?
(Gotta figure out what Blogger is doing to my table styles!)
























Python Developer $88,000
Product Developer $72,000
Web Developer Net $69,000
QA Test Analyst $74,000
Computer Programmer $54,000
Application Development Manager $104,000
Senior Information Architect $86,000
Linux Engineer $88,000

















plone $74,000


drupal $71,000


wordpress $61,000


joomla $71,000




View Larger Salary Graph



How Well Do Plone Books Sell on Amazon?
Please see my earlier post.


Wednesday, October 15, 2008

CMS-476 Database Design

Its the final evening of my College of Santa Fe Computer-Math Science 476 class. That's the Database Design class for non-traditional (evening and weekend) students. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I'm able to take their UML modeling skills and use them to create a Plone product in a single evening. A series of screencasts is up on YouTube describing the process (start with Part B and then chase down the others, C through to G).

The exercise was met with very positive responses from the students. A couple of them will actually be implementing something in Plone in their day-jobs. For example, a student who works at the Los Alamos National Laboratory Emergency Operations Center learned of a former student who has already created an archetype for EOC equipment inventory. Looks like a great fit.

Also, here's the news on Packt's open source awards from Nate Aune:

In case you hadn't heard already, Plone has been nominated for the
"Best Overall Open Source CMS" and the "Best Other Open Source CMS"
categories in the Packt Publishing CMS awards and is now a finalist.
If you haven't voted already, please do it now! The voting ends on
Oct. 20, so there are only 5 days remaining to cast your vote.

Vote for Plone in the "Best Overall Open Source CMS" award

Vote for Plone in the "Best Other Open Source CMS" award

Spread the word - here is a news item about the awards on Plone.org

See the other finalists for the Best Overall Open Source CMS award:

See the other finalists for the Best Other Open Source CMS award:

Thanks for supporting Plone!

Thursday, October 9, 2008

World Plone Conference 2008

The Conference has been going well and I've had a good time making new connections, renewing acquaintances, and learning lots about Plone. Even if only one session per day was stellar, these Plone Conferences would be worth the time and money. The trouble is, there are lots of stellar sessions each day.

At left Limi talks about his vision for where the Plone user experience is heading. I've also attended very worthwhile talks by Joel Burton, David Glick, Calvin Hendryx-Parker, and a fascinating Birds of a Feather session about Cooperation and Collaboration as a Business Model.

Tomorrow I'm looking forward to Clayton Parker's Buildout talk or Burton's KSS talk (oh, no! a conflict). There's also a potential conflict between Lawrence Row's SQLAlchemy session and Nate Aune's multimedia talk.

Probably over lunch Friday Nate and I will catch up with Mark Corum and discuss Plone marketing ideas, strategies, and a path forward.



Meanwhile on the general CMS news front, Infoworld has a piece referenced by Yahoo! IT news about Acquia and Drupal.

One thing jumped out at me, this item:
You'll still need to have hardware already set up with PHP, MySQL (or PostgreSQL), and a Web server, such as Apache. Don't underestimate the work to get this running -- especially in a large production setting. It took me about a day to set up and troubleshoot this stack on my Windows Server 2003 server.
Ye gods! Downloading the Plone Windows installer takes longer than running it and then you've got an out-of-the-box, fully functioning Plone instance on any Windows machine you want. But a full day to configure the stack for Drupal?! My students in my database design class at the College of Santa Fe install Plone and create a fully featured custom data type from a UML class diagram in a single class session.

Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Theming Plone 3, Day 2

Just finished Joel Burton's excellent intensive two-day mini-course on Theming Plone 3. Good stuff. Learned tons about many, many intricacies of 3.1. This is critical as we need to upgrade our many existing 2.5 sites and start implementing new portals with the most recent technology.

Leslie Molecke from the City of Albuquerque web portal team had recommended Joel's bootcamps. They took his training last year and it was extremely helpful. Take a look at http://www.cabq.gov/albuquerquegreen for some of their handiwork.

Having been through a mini-bootcamp now, I can recommend it (or better still, the full-length version) to anyone working in Plone. Even dyed-in-the-wool Pythonistas are guaranteed to learn
something about the way Plone skins and themes its pages. Seems like every hour, even if the topic was elementary CSS, I learned several useful tidbits. Worth every penny, assuming that pennies have any worth after this week's market crashes.

Meanwhile, its 7:30 EDT here at the hotel and I'm taking a break from grading papers for Database Design. Too bad the Pentagon City Marriott is so far from the Plone Conference social evening up at the Science Hall near Dupont Circle. Have to miss this one.

Tomorrow the 2008 Conference begins and it looks to be full of great talks and tutorials. I'll be looking for Nate Aune and Mark Corum to discuss Plone marketing, statistics, metrics, and advocacy.

Nate sent me a fairly recent link I'd missed -- http://www.waterandstone.com/resources.html as well as pointers to a couple of his pages -- http://www.openplans.org/projects/plone-marketing/metrics-and-statistics and http://www.openplans.org/projects/plone-marketing/metrics. More on these as I have time to digest them.

Monday, October 6, 2008

Plone Bootcamp

I'm sitting in Joel Burton's Theming Sites with Plone 3 Bootcamp ahead of the 2008 World Plone Conference. Looks to be a good thing targeted for my needs, moving from 2.5 to 3.1.

First thing this morning as I was wandering more or less lost, jetlagged and tired through the Ronald Reagan Center a pleasant fellow in a Plone t-shirt asked if he could help me find someplace. I said, "Oceanic B" and he introduced himself as Joel and directed me to the nearby classroom. An auspicious start. At left, Joel discusses working with TAL, one of those things that I can do, but not particularly well.

For the morning, there has been a healthy amount of review, but also the beginnings of the 3.1 way of doing things. There have been a few cool tricks, too. Using http://127.0.0.1 in one tab and http://localhost in another let's me be logged on as site manager in one tab and be an anonymous user in another. No more Firefox for admin and IE for a test user.

The new style portal_view_customizations is also a key concept. The portal_view_customizations defaults to the Registration view and customized items are highlighted in yellow. The non-obvious need to explicitly click on the Contents tab before deleting a totally hozed object is a good tip to remember. Additionally, the use of portal_types to specify alternative templates was a good piece of information--even for us dinosaurs running 2.5 sites.

Caught a glimpse of Limi in the hallway. In a brief 10-second exchange he reports that San Fran is good (doesn't miss all the snow in Norway) but that he needs to work on the balance between Google and Plone.

More tomorrow regarding the second day of class and then on to the Conference proper on Wednesday.