We attended Plone Symposium East 2010

The Main Event

We attended Plone Symposium East 2010, which included the following activities:

• one day of WSGI training; WSGI is a standard for writing web applications so that they may be connected to each other to build complex systems; Plone is moving to this standard
• two days of talks
• two days of sprints, in which we collaborated with others on advancing coding, testing, documentation, and marketing initiatives

PloneEdu Launch

Our Notes

Highlights

There was a lot of buzz over our very own uwosh.northstar Plone product, which is a tool that will allow business users to create their own online business processes ("workflow apps") with almost no developer intervention.  

• Eric Steele, the Plone release manager, stated his intention of including NorthStar in the Plone 4.1 release.  
• Another presenter, Cris Ewing of the University of Washington in Seattle, rewrote half of his Plone workflow presentation once he learned of NorthStar; the last half of his presentation became a demonstration of NorthStar's features.
• In my presentation on developing a campus intranet, much of the questions were on NorthStar and how we designed it to generate file system products based on PloneFormGen mockups.  Some leading lights in the Plone world were extremely interested in this particular feature.

It was announced that Nathan Van Gheem is a member of the new Plone user interface team.

Yours truly was a panel participant on the PloneEdu launch.  We were asked how the educational community had helped us, how we saw PloneEdu helping other educational institutions, and what we have set as our PloneEdu goals for the coming year.  In my case, I am heading up the Product Evaluation Committee and intend to centralize product evaluations and make them a basis for creating an "edu installer" for Plone.

Nathan and I were interviewed by a Penn State newspaper, on the topic of open source, Plone, and the Plone Symposium.