My final post on the DZUG conference is intended to give you a little idea what happened in general and giving a little
summary of the keynote by Martijn Faassen.
The conference in general
First of all we had plenty of talks splitted into two tracks with an additional workshop track. Unfortunately I only was
able to attend one track mainly which was the Zope/Plone track. The other track seems to have been about ZMS mainly and
all the aspects such as how to set it up etc. So this track might have been better for end users while the Zope/Plone
track was a mix of general business overview e.g. related to eGovernment and more technical talks such as those about
Five and Viewlets.
I also didn’t attend the workshops so I cannot say anything about these. Beside that there were some discussion rounds
about how DZUG should interact with institutions as well as the annual DZUG meeting. Discussion there was about how to
do better Zope marketing like on fairs or the example of the give-books-to-your-public-library program. Additionally
some discussion was being made on how to reach the DZUG members better and there’s the plan to create a printed magazine
for that. Of course there was also discussion about where to hold the next conference (probably Potsdam).
Last but not least there was a sprint going on for the whole week where people like Hanno Schlichting, Andreas
Witsch and Tom Lazaar were sprinting (the latter mostly on the by then unfinished PLIPs they were working
on at the Norway sprint). I’d expect some blog posts by them to explain what they did and achieved.
The keynote by Martijn Faassen
The conference was rounded up by a nice keynote by Martijn Faassen. After instructing the german audience
that there might be some funny elements in this talks and it’s allowed to laugh (no idea why he felt inclined
to tell so ;-) ) he was giving sort of an overview of the history of Zope (starting way back in 1994 with the first
Python Workshop) and where it’s going today also compared to our friends and competitors. He used the last part to
work out some differences in marketing regarding the website. This of course is a well known problem as Django,
TurboGears and Pylons all have great homepages while the Zope homepage has actually close to zero information about
Zope 3 and it’s also not necessarily appealing to some random visitor (at least not regarding in understanding
what Zope is).
Reflecting the keynote
Now adding some thoughts of mine to that I think there are of course certain differences between Zope and the rest.
The other frameworks have been more or less developed by one person or at least a company. And as they are relatively
new (compared to Zope which is basically 10 years old now as Martijn pointed out) it should have felt natural to their
authors to give them an appealing homepage. The other factor here is the community. Zope probably has a much bigger
user community now as the other frameworks had when they first came out. This is surely growing over there but I think
the handling of the homepage etc. is still mainly done by the main authors. This actually is also true for sites
like Plone btw.
This is different in the zope.org case. Here it is actually not really clear who is responsible for that. Once it
was Digital Creations/Zope Corporation but they sort of handed it over to the community. And this might have led to
some sort of stillstand. Or at least there is usually lots of discussion when it comes to changing the site (right now
it would probably be about which CMS to use). This actually might not be beneficial.
But the good thing is that things should soon be changing or at least have the potential to change with the advent
of the Zope foundation. When this is fully in place then there will be a central place with power to make a final
decision of things like what CMS to use etc. Right now they also work on their own Foundation homepage to try things
out and after that a new zope.org and a Zope3 homepage (it might be the same though) is on the agenda.
They are also still searching for volunteers, so if you want to help make sure to signup to
the zope web mailing list.
So much for my thoughts on that.
Summary
Actually what I heard often actually was one thing about Plone: Try to use as much of plain Plone as possible and try to
invent as less as possible yourself and look very close on 3rd party products if they really will give you a benefit
as all this might be a hassle when it comes to upgrading. So I thought I note that here. No idea if this can be changed
somehow in the future but it would definitely be nice as there are so many cool products out there which are useful.
Summarizing the conference I think it was again a great success and I want to thank all the organizers to make it
happen!
You can also see now the keynote video up on COM.lounge TV. There will follow more stuff
later once I am back from vacation (and have some time :-) ).
This is also the last post for me for two weeks now as I am off for vacation (yay! :-) )