Synopisis of the symposium: people talked to, ideas harvested, talks attended general impressions

Always humbling to be around so many smart people.  This year much of what I gleaned was less technical details and more business process and project process oriented.  As usual, I had to make sacrifices due to the two track system.  What I did attend:

• CacheFu(Geoff Davis)
  Caught the first half and got some more info(since I was rooming with the author).  There are some optimizations that never made it from SpeedPack to plone proper that we could try in the next round of optimization.
• Plone and Non-Profits (ONENW)
  Second half, and talked to these guys for a good long time afterwards (grabbed 2 extra handouts).  They are tackling alot of the same problems at a lower granularity than we will be: accidental technologist, the non-techie.  There is a potential partnership here for us as a data hub, and them as a deployer of nonprofit sites(ie, when someone's personal project grows wings).
  
  1. documentation as the bulwark against the long tail of support
     
  2. big emphasis on integration as the future of plone
  3. don't use Poi or bugtrackers with mere mortals
• Alternative Templating Systems w/ Zope
  (Chris McDonough)
  Chris talked on meld and z3meld a system that completely separates template logic from code.   It's about 2x faster in certain situations, and has the advantage of very declarative layout defined in zcml rather than solely in zpt.   This looks very promising for several reasons:
  
  1. designers only have to deal with one non-HTML tag
  2. since relationships between templates are declarative, they are easier to maintain
  3. combining this with the new view customization software might be a good way to implement a user editable page layout without exposing anything a user could hurt themselves on. 
     
• Ad Banner System(Claytron)
  Interesting pattern of content insertion into other pages.  conversation with Calvin Hendryx-Parker about RDF was more important.
• CMF 2.0 Introduction(Tres Seaver)
  This was actually a nice wrap-up of the Goldegg project, an initiative to push more of the framework bits of plone down into CMF.  It also summarized the amount of change that Five is causing in the lower levels of the stack.  Main interesting technical points: inline python is available in the new customizable view system, Tres is rewriting CMFCollector using Five.
• Bling!(ben saller)
  Ben may operate in complete disdain of modern development style in the plone/zope community, but bling is quite cool and leverages existing AT behavior.  His inplace editing with tinyMCE would solve two problems for us: no editor for safari, and the doldrums of page reload.
  
• Keynote: Andrei Codrescui
  This was the highlight of the whole trip. 
  
• Mechanisms to Promote Free Market and Open Source Software Innovation(Dr. Geoffery Parker)
  This guy rocks so hard.  A fascinating description of the economics of different licensing strategies and a crash course in business strategy.  The geist: there is a sweet point between proprietary licensing and the GPL that maximizes adoption and the financial benefit to the creator of a piece of software.  This also probably has the happy side effect of better software.
• Debugging Zope(J. Cameron Cooper)
  learned a little more about zope prompt debugging, in particular how to grab objects by oid out of a transaction and inspect them.
  
• skeletor
  this was my talk.  The best part was the end, where I got alot feedback on what technologies people were using and automation strategies that were out there(particularily mcdonc's pymake which forms a basic for script to setup all the dependencies for a site from python on up)
  

As with most events, much of the good stuff is at dinner, in the bar, at the lightening talks.   some highlights:

• Penn State, Chapel Hill have growing plone / zope populations in the academic sector
• Calvin Hendryx-Parker has a running example of url traversal across an RDF graph
• There are some moves to get a teamspace like system for law going that might dovetail very nicely with the topp system.
• when I tell people what I am working on, they get excited.
• the sqlalchemy story for plone may not be far off(good for integration with non-plone systems)
• Entransit has gotten easier to deploy / PloneDesktop might be an interesting option for our windows users
• Plone is really lucky to have Wichert Akkerman working on plone projects.
• Participated in the BOF for best practices. Big topics: Taxonomy vs. Tagging, SmartFolder(too smart?). Interestingly, it was all about users, rather than best practices for developers.
  

As far as the health of plone and it's community, people seem to be doing bigger stuff successfully. The conference was successful in showing that.