Prompted by Jon Stahl’s entry on the PloneBlog I want to point you to one of the more tangible results of my participation in this year’s Snow Sprint, namely Plone Improvement Proposal (PLIP) #128 a.k.a. Pluggable Plone Syndication – the collective brainchild of Ben Ackland and Rick Hurst from Netsight, Nate Aune and yours truly.

The idea behind it is to get rid of the necessity for dedicated blog products and blog-specific content types in Plone and to treat blogging less like a product and more as a use case. To this end we’ve started to create generic feed templates using Zope3 views, interfaces and adapters (via Five) for all ATCT types and a clean way for 3rd-party developers to create adapters for their content types (i.e. ATAudio to create podcasts).

After initial struggles with the new Zope3 approach (and lots of wrestling with Jean-Francoir’s and Russ’s z3-enabled-branch of ATCT – thanks for your patience, guys!) we’re happy to have been able to implement a working proof-of-concept by the very last day of the sprint ;-)

What now remains is lots of cleaning up and polishing. Ben has already contacted me about getting that underway, but since we’re both swamped with paying-the-rent type of work, we don’t expect to get back to that until next week. For those of you interested in the project, I suggest subscribing to the RSS-feed of our changelog. Any feedback is more than welcome – if we get this one right, Plone could become the über-blogsoftware ;-)

Most of the audience here have probably already heard of A List Apart - but some of you (like me) might have not caught their recent relaunch - until today...

Apparently, it's been months in the making (unlike mine, which took five days...) but boy, does the result speak for itself. Perhaps to most of you it might seem like nothing special, but I swear, this has got to be the damn finest looking website I have seen - evar!

Oooh, after over one month of silenceBrian finally promises an update to their very promising Plone based Weblog software Quills.

I simply can't wait ;-) Go Brian, go!

While I always did think that NewsFire looks better than NNW, NNW simply runs circles around it concerning both usabiliy as well as functionality.

Now, you can get yourself a little bit of that look for NNW via Wolfgang Bartelme's modification of Matthew Mabers CSS.

Okay, I'll be honest: the real reason I've set up this Intranet CMS for a client last week was to give his users a more formal (and less invasive) way of letting me know about their IT woes than ringing my mobile all the time - talk about laziness being the mother of all invention ;-)

Having established that I'm lazy we can safely assume that I wanted a really simple solution i.e. a full blown issue tracking system such as PloneCollectorNG was out of the question.

Seriously, the main reason for not using that is that such systems raise the entry bar too high for the users. If a tool is too complex, nobody will use it, trust me.

So, I've simply installed a blog (SimpleBlog 1.2.1, that is, befittingly) and added categories such as Mac, Windows, Email, Urgent, Printing etc. That's it. Nothing else. Fini.

This keeps it fairly simple for the users, too, though. Since I've linked the Plone site via LDAP to our OSX Server, all they need to do is log in with their usual credentials and fill out a little form - voila!

I, in turn, have subscribed to the RSS feed of this blog and know, whenever something is up. And on my weekly routine visit on-site I know exactly what's waiting for me. Also, for example, one click on the 'Windows' category tells my Windows admin at one glance what he's in for, as well.

It may not sound like much, but to have a central, authoritative, chronological list of who had which issue broken down into categories is a real boon for my work.

And as a nerd I've got this warm fuzzy feeling of having accomplished 90% results with 10% effort - and it involves a blog! Can't beat that ;-)