Matt Hamilton discusses five aspects he loves about Plone, including its strong community, buildout deployment, ZODB for object persistence, Diazo theming capabilities, and the use of Python. He also mentions five frustrations, such as legacy code, outdated documentation, inefficiencies in the catalog, unclear quality evolution, and the slow consensus-based decision-making process inherent in its democratic structure. Overall, he highlights both the strengths and challenges of working with Plone.

1. BathCamp CMS Smackdown!
Matt Hamilton
President, Plone Foundation

2. 5 Things I Love about
Plone

3. Love #1
The Community

17. Love #2
Buildout
Deployment, versioning, build, etc

18. [buildout]
extensions = mr.developer
parts =
productdistros
instance
zopepy
# Change the number here to change the version of Plone being used
extends =
http://dist.plone.org/release/4.2b2/versions.cfg
versions = versions
sources = sources
# Add additional egg download sources here. dist.plone.org contains archives
# of Plone packages.
find-links =
http://dist.plone.org/release/4.2b2
http://dist.plone.org/thirdparty
# Add additional eggs here
eggs =
PIL
collective.cookiecontrol
# Reference any eggs you are developing here, one per line
# e.g.: develop = src/my.package
develop =
src/collective.cookiecontrol

19. Love #3
The ZODB

20. ZODB
• Released in late 90’s -- yeah we’ve been
doing NoSQL since before your CMS was a
glint in your creators eye
• Transparent object persistence
• Full ACID-compatible transaction support
• Pluggable storages

21. ZODB
myobject.foo = ‘bar’

22. Love #4
Diazo
Theme any site (not even just Plone) without touching it.
Really.

23. The next bit was a live demo, I’ve captured a few
screenshots for this version of the presentation on
Slideshare

24. rules.xml
<rules
xmlns="http://namespaces.plone.org/diazo"
xmlns:css="http://namespaces.plone.org/diazo/css"
xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
<theme href="http://bathcamp.org/" />
<replace css:theme-children="#content"
css:content-children="#content" />
</rules>

27. rules2.xml
<rules
xmlns="http://namespaces.plone.org/diazo"
xmlns:css="http://namespaces.plone.org/diazo/css"
xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
<theme href="http://bathcamp.org/" />
<replace css:theme-children="#content"
css:content-children="#content" />
<replace css:theme-children="#em_widget-4"
css:content-children="#portletwrapper-706c6f6
e652e7269676874636f6c756d6e0a636f6e746578740a2f506c6f6e650a657665
6e7473" />
</rules>

33. Love #5
Python

34. Python
"When

35. I

36. used

37. to

38. program

39. in

40. Java

41. I

42. used

43. to

44. first

45.
think

46. how

47. to

48. solve

49. the

50. problem,

51. then

52. I

53. had

54. to

55.
think

56. how

57. to

58. code

59. that

60. in

61. Java.

62.
With

63. Python

64. I

65. think

66. how

67. to

68. solve

69. the

70. problem,

71.
then

72. just

73. write

74. it
Matt Sital-Singh, Netsight Developer

75. 5 Things I Hate about
Plone

76. Hate #1
Legacy Code

77. Legacy Code
• When you’ve been around over a decade,
you accumulate a lot of code. The world
moves on
• Major refactoring going on Zope 4 = -20%
code

78. Legacy Code

79. Hate #2
Old Documentation

81. Hate #3
Everything in the
Catalog

82. Everything in Catalog
• Seemed a good idea at the time
• Solr etc didn’t exist back then

83. Hate #4
Quality Evolution
not obvious

87. Hate #5
Democratic nature
can mean slow
fruition of ideas

88. Democratic
• No one company
• Means you don’t get lead down one route
• Means consensus can take a while

89. http://plone.org
@plone