ploneconf-2005

So, PloneConf2005 is over and I'm back in Berlin sitting at my desk - bills, appointments, a stack of unanswered client emails, a broken washing machine and an empty fridge are waiting for me ;-) But I'm giving myself another hour or two though, before I'll start tackling all of that and will enjoy the limbo created by the waning presence of the conference and the increasing gravitational pull of the real life[tm] while it lasts...

There's the obligatory flickr tag if you want to get an idea of what it looked like here (although none of the photos do the venue justice - it used to be the props studio for the Vienna Opera where they would create and store the huge backdrops for the stage which is why all the doors and ceilings are so insanely high...)

So now I'll be sorting out all those gazilillon scribbled notes I took during the conference and enter the all business cards I've received into my addressbook. Personally, the most interesting contacts that I've made at the conference are those of other "one-man-plone-shops" such as myself - it's great to see that others are going down (and succeeding on) the same path that I have set for myself and I believe that there is a very real opportunity for synergies and mutual support. Time will tell ;-)

Wrapping it up I can say the conference has exceeded all my expectations, thanks to all who attended and who I've been able to talk to and also to Gogo of blue dynamics for his very generous hospitality: thanks for having us and don't forget to check your fridge ;-)

• Jerry McRea is a mind reader and wrote a tool for managing and creating Zope instances pretty much precisely to my specifications without me ever having told anybody ;-) One thing however is crucially absent: a script-based viable backup strategy. But at least now I have a good base onto which to add such a strategy ;-)

• Opera seems to be a viable alternative for my mail- and news requirements. Who'd've thunk it? After a 15 minute lunchtable evangelism session by limi I'm actually going to give it a try. (According to rumours, Opera also contains a web browser).

• LinguaPlone and Members folders don't mix. You might want to consider abandoning Members folders in any Plone instance that you run with LP - most use cases of Plone don't really call for those folders anyway.

• PloneOntology could be really interesting for managing the articles on ds.ccc.de - once I've actually got it up and running ;-)

• educ()ommons is also something to watch out for. "An OpenCourseWare Management System designed specifically to support OpenCourseWare projects like MIT OCW and USU OCW". To quote John Dehlin (he's here at the conference): "it's all about sharing university learning materials with the world--openly, and freely (think people in India, or China, or South America, or even the rural UK, having access to learning materials never before possible)". A commendable effort - If you're in education check it out.
  

• drinking beer with fellow-plonistas is all very well and probably equally important compared to the talks and tutorials but perhaps tonight I'll manage not to stay up drinking until 4 a.m. and instead actually manage to attend the opening note at nine... Also, a Gin & Tonic does not "refresh you" after having too many beers, no matter what Gogo claims ;-)

• ATCT have become ridiculously rich and comfortable. Martin Aspeli's tutorial had me positively drooling! In case you're a Plone Developer/User and haven't seen his presentation - I do realize, that some of the readers of this blog are actually not at the conference ;-) you owe it to yourself to check out his RichDocument tutorial at plone.org which he based his talk on. The following bullets pertain to that:

• use FTI to register layouts for a content type.

• INonStructuralFolder for making a folderish object that otherwise doesn't behave like a folder!

• RichDocument's attachments and images are workflowless and thus have the security restrictions of the container (i.e. the document) applied.

• folder.getFolderListing() now returns brains not objects by default

• Completely unrelated to that: Safari has turned into a big stinking pile of excrement ever since Tiger. I've made a clean install of Mac OS X 10.4.2 on Saturday and ever since it has crashed six or seven times - and of course just as I had downloaded 80% of the XCode Developer Tools and having opened twenty-something tabs from NetNewsWire...
  

• The talks I've attended so far have been well worthwhile, but also the time between the sessions are useful. In the beginning I was hesitant to approach people, especially the 'rock stars', but every time I finally did the response was very friendly and helpful and eventhough I still hardly know anybody here (and so do probably most others here, as well!) I've definitely gained the feeling of belonging here and being a part of it all.
• I met Florian Schulz and he explained to me the workings of the new Ressource Registry and I had a very con- and instructive chat with Geir Bækholt (author of LinguaPlone) and will now finally move ahead and make my own site multilingual using his advice.
• Joel Burton's talk on Best Practices was very concise and practical, I was, however surprised at how much of the stuff I already knew and practiced myself until it hit me: Andi had just visited last year's Plone Conference just prior to him and I collaborating on the DirecType site during which he had infused me with those very practices. Looking back from this perspective I'm really impressed with how Andi picked this stuff up so fast and passed it on - at the time I had the impression that he had been doing it like that for years ;-) The one thing from Burt's talk that was new to me and might prove really useful was his plug for WingIDE as a debugging tool. I'm downloading the free trial, as I'm writing this and will report back once I've taken it for a spin.
• The Apple Hardware percentage here is really remarkable. The best thing about it (to me) is that the Mac users here are usually not the typical Mac User but in most cases (so I assume) converted Linux users and it's quite refreshing to see Macs being used in a UNIX way rather than just as a Web-, Office- and Graphicsplatform.
• The venue is really cool. And since only two of the four floors are actually used by the conference I was able to take a much needed nap on one of the top floors - I actually slept deeply for a full thirty minutes ;-)
• I have yet to meet an impolite Viennese.
• If you leave the (new) default behaviour of Plone 2.1 to not enabling editing of short names off it will rename the (initially cryptic) short name to a websafe version of the object's Title - neat! (This makes especially for very "pretty" multilingual URLs).
• Lunch, snacks and drinks are included in the conference fee - including Almdudler (some sort of herbal lemonade) and (from 5 pm onwards) beer from tap.

This conference being my first real-world exposure to the Plone Community I naturally didn't quite know what to expect. Yesterday evening however, at the opening meeting (which took place at a restaurant, not at the conference venue) - as the evening progressed - I already knew that I'll get my money's worth here just by watching the people and how they interacted. It was incredibly loud - but there was no music playing. Just a large room with several dozen of people talking - happily, lively and intense. Makes for quite an atmoshpere, I can tell you.

My goals for the conference (besides attending talks and tutorials) are going to meet the two folks who wrote the new ResourceRegistry in Plone 2.1 and not let go of them until I understood how it works - currently it's still driving me nuts ;-)

Secondly I'd finally like to really wrap my head around Lingua Plone and get a working setup.

The venue is great (alas, not heated and I'm so glad I've brought my fleece...) and I'm really pleased with the organizational aspects of everything.

I'm sitting with Andi at Vienna Airport enjoying a melange and free, non-proxied wireless internet. The flight was as smooth and uneventful as one could have hoped.

It seems to be the same deal here with public transportation and airports as with many cities these days: there is a shiny new privately owned transportation that is prominently advertised. Here it began already in the shuttle bus from the plane to the arrivals hall and continued with omnipresent, bright-green vending machines for the CAT service - from the airport to downtown Vienna in 16 minutes (for EUR 9). And then, there is the "traditional" transportation, neatly tucked away and out of sight to anyone who doesn't know what they're looking for. We looked round but found nothing.

But after asking two (quite friendly) machinepistol wielding guards they told us, that the vending machines for the regular public transportation are located directly at the platform - turns out, a ticket into town costs three(!) euros and the trip takes 24 minutes.

And if we hadn't managed to get totally lost on our way back to the terminal we'd be downtown already, but instead we treated ourselves to a break - at least now we know the way ;-)

Andi has aquired a map of free wifi hotspots in Vienna and there will be WLAN at the conference, of course so I'm afraid I'll be posting lots of non-sense like this entry over the next three days... you have been warned.