mardi 23 novembre 2004

Skin donors Olivier from Ingeniweb, owner of the sexy iMac G5 that I want, sent a note to say that ploneskins.org is available as a "community repository for Plone skins". As Olivier said in his mail to me: "We feel there is a NEED for such a space on the internet, in order to have more and more people use Plone. We decided to build this website when we heard again and again "All Plone websites look the same ..." I very much agree with that we should show proof this isn't true. BTW, Olivier, you should make a link to the plone.org page that has links to Plone sites that don't look like Plone. Of course, you'll ask me for the URL, which I don't have. [wink] 6:10:22 PM   comment []

Help support research on Zope! Last week I gave a talk at the Calibre conference. (More on the talk in a later post.) Calibre's mission is to help make sure open/libre software flourishes in the European "secondary" software industry. Calibre is funded by the EU to collect and disseminate best practices. They are keenly interested in Zope. If we help them, they can help us by spreading the word. They can also help us at the macro level, by improving the industrial climate towards open source business. Calibre needs to find out more about Zope. It would really help all of us if you could spend 7 minutes and fill out the Zope Developer Community Survey, created by one of the Calibre researcher teams in Brest. 10:02:44 AM   comment []

Inaugural Plone Belgium user group meeting Last Tuesday I attended the inaugural meeting of the Plone Belgium user group. The meeting was organized by Godefroid Chapelle and Fabien Nkundabagenzi, and hosted by Fabien at the Royal Museum for Central Africa. All in all, a strong success: they expected 10 or 20 people and got 30. David and Louis gave the first presentation, on the topic of bibliographic references. This is a topic that is fascinating to me from a content management perspective. Though focused on bibtex, their ideas show that you can add value not just to the content, but the relationships between content. They also did the extra effort on polish and finishing work in their products. Next, Jean Baltus gave a presentation on "Alternative solutions to LinguaPlone". Things they liked about LP: easy translation, protocol compatibility, works out of the box, might become a de facto standard in Plone. Dislikes: the ways ids are generated, object deletion, "magic" in the UI, and only for Archetypes. (Note: points 1 and 3 are under some discussion.) Xavier then gave a presentation on Zope Europe, discussing the need and opportunity of a business network. I then gave a demo of "Plone Enterprise", the code name for the results of a major NGO project that produced multisite, multilingual, versioning, and other large CMS features. I'll put up a narrated demo later, but if you're interested, email me at paul at zope-europe.org. Fabien and Godefroid then took over and discussed the Plone Belgium user group. This was an open session, where everyone brainstormed ideas about meeting frequencies, things to discuss, etc. I was particularly interested in ways to focus meeting on users. For example, hands-on introductions to specific features in Plone, or pairing up to do Q&A. It really was a pleasure to attend this meeting. I hope Plone Belgium grows, and I hope other user groups pop up as well. 9:45:21 AM   comment []