Content Management Matters ™

Plone's uber-trainer and developer extraordinaire, Joel Burton, gave a wonderful presentation today on ways to make Plone run fast. Really, really fast.

The Plone Web content management system has long had a somewhat deserved reputation for being slow. However, that's truly only because Plone is optimized out-of-the-box for development, and people don't always figure out that reconfiguration is needed to get great performance in a deployment situation.

Sites like Novell.com and CIA.gov clearly show that Plone can perform extremely well, if only a bit of care and attention is paid by the developer.

You can download the presentation here.

Veda Williams, a project manager at One/Northwest who manages many a Plone implementation, gave us all here at the Plone Conference some advice on best practices for managing smaller Plone Web content management projects.

I found a lot of her presentation extremely familiar, as it meshed very well with my own experiences, and frankly, it all applies to any tech project, not just Plone.

Calvin Hendryx-Parker from SixFeetUp gave an interesting talk at the Plone Conference, advising strongly to only use Plone for its strengths, and not try to make it do what it's not optimized to do.

Plone does a tremendous number of things extremely well, but not everything. So at what point does it make sense to integrate a 3rd party application? Reinout van Rees blogged about the presentation. The bottom line:

"Our time is valuable. Why waste it by trying to hammer a square peg in a round hole? Pick the right tools for the right job and let Plone do the things it is good at."

Plone fest continues here in Naples. Sally Kleinfeldt from the Nature Conservancy is presently giving a talk about the ways their organization approached Plone development for their custom application development.

Its day two of the Plone Conference 2007 here in Naples, Italy. This morning we're sitting in the Conference Keynote speech which is being delivered in tandom by Alan Runyan and Alex Limi.

Following are my notes covering the state of the Plone union, Plone 3 and more.

Plone's intellectual property is owned by the non-profit Plone Foundation, whose mission it to protect and promote Plone.

The Foundation uses the Plone Conference as a wonderful opportunity to have an "All Member" meeting. Following are my notes...

Reinout van Rees blogged about a Plone Conference 2007 presentation given by Jean-Paul Ladage about an intranet built with Plone for the 6,000 person research department of Phillips. Unlike many Plone websites, this project required large scale personalization.

To quote:

The site has only logged-in users and a few thousand actually log in every day. This is different from most of the Plone sites, where you have a large majority of anonymous users. The users are authenticated against a 200,000 user LDAP database.

Check out the original piece or read more of our conference coverage.

Here in the afternoon sessions of the Plone Conference 2007 Nate Aune from Boston-based Jazkarta is giving a talk on a suite of products that are together called Plone4Artists -- a Plone add-on that provides significant multi-media content management for Plone.

Next up on the conference agenda is my presentation entitled Plone For Media.

While quite the dexterous typer I won't be able to simultaneous blog about it and present. That won't stop us however. A good amount of the material will be coming directly from the case study published last week, here on CMSWire. Check out the article Case Study: Discovering Plone Content Management System (Part 1).

More tid bits from the Plone Conference -- Maurits Van Rees just blogged about a talk here covering the latest news and progress of a new e-commerce add-on for Plone. We like the honesty of the module's name: GetPaid.

Here at the Plone Conference, I'm taking a few notes at Darci Hanning's 10 Ways to Engage the Plone Community talk.

Darci tells us this talk will not be super valuable to developers. The point is that you don't have to be a programmer to be enormously helpful to Plone. Darci's talk is really for people who use Plone as an integration platform or as a user, and want to help promote and support the Plone project.

What a wonderful venue, Naples, Italy.

The insane drivers, the beautiful architecture, the delicious pizza. Plone Conferences have given me an opportunity to visit some wonderful places like New Orleans and Vienna, Austria. At each conference I've been to, the facilities just keep getting better and better.

This conference has been no exception. It's being held at "The City of Science", a wonderful venue with large conference rooms, great sound and projection systems, delicious catering, and super-strong WiFi. My only complaint so far is that there just are not enough electrical sockets in the conference rooms. My laptop needs a better battery!

I want to give a very special thanks to Abstract Open Solutions for putting this together.

It is impossible to understand the value of Plone the product without having a sense of Plone the community.

Personally, I believe that Plone has one of the strongest communities in the open source world. My first evening at the Plone Conference has done nothing to dissuade me from that point of view, and I had some really interesting conversations with several people about their ideas for Plone.

I am sitting in Jon Stahl's wonderful overview of the new Plone 3.0 features at the Plone Conference in Naples, Italy and must say that I'm very impressed that I could have been sitting at home in the US, watching along in real time in the virtual world of Second Life.

Anybody who wants to virtually participate, just search for "Plone" on Second Life or check out the SLurl, and you can join all the fun we're having!