This document summarizes a presentation about the history and community behind the Plone open source content management system (CMS). It discusses that Plone began in 1998 as part of Zope and was started as its own project in 2000. It notes that the Plone community is made up of many small consulting companies and public sector IT departments working together. The document highlights Plone's flexibility and security as well as the challenges of its large codebase and getting others interested in the project.

1. Beauty of
the beast
Mikko Ohtamaa
World Plone Day 2013
Jyväskylä

2. Agenda
★ History of Plone
★ Psyche of the community
★ What it takes to get there

3. opensourcehacker.com
Open Source Hacker
mikko@redinnovation.com
moo9000

4. Oldest living open
source CMS*
★ Zope 1998
★ Plone 2000
★ Plone Foundation
2004
*) unless claimed otherwise

5. There is no one on the
driver’s seat
The community is an organic
mash up of small consulting
shops having beer with public
sector IT departments

6. ★ Plone Foundation, non-profit rights holder
★ 240 active or emeritus Foundation
members
★ 50+ sponsors
★ 400 guests in conference
Living and kicking

7. Everybody loves
Plone ♥

8. (except
developers)
(ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻

9. Plone is famous for
★ Python programming language
★ Security
★ Flexibility
★ Not being famous

10. Byproducts of community
★274 installed packages
★255 MB installed source code
★228 + 890 Github repos

11. Zope2/Startup/misc/zpasswd.py:
Copyright (C) 1999, 2000 Digital Creations, Inc.

12. Plone has only 1 feature
★There is no thing it cannot do
★ Most advanced plugin system ever
written in any programming language
★ Most advanced permission, role and
sharing system which bends so you
don’t have to

13. Riding the beast
★ Self-organizing community teams
★ High degree of automatization and
continuous integration
★ Enhancement proposals “PLIPs”

14. Battle-scarred community
★ Old enough to look into a mirror and
admit the mistakes of the past
★ Most friendly community
★ No question goes unanswered ... but
you might regret asking
“We were young.
We needed the money.”

15. Plone community
attracts most intelligent
and interesting people...

16. ...and happens everywhere
★ World conference
★ 2-4 continental
symposiums
★ ~10 sprints
★ ~10 virtual Tune Ups
★ 1 World Plone Day

17. Unparalleled
opportunity for
international
co-operation

18. Not
always
so
easy

19. Too much
Python
View
Viewlet Manager
Viewlets
TAL
HTML
DOM / lxml
Diazo XML
XSLT
Component
LookupError
WTF ??? Robot
Git

20. ... like Finland in Eurovision
Popular and well-known
0

21. Not a part-time hobby
to get to Plone you must go and
meet people in strange places

22. Far

23. ★ Ugliest legacy codebase
★ Not having smart enough living
person to fix your bug
★ No one caring about us
...still...
Even with...

24. Plone is the best CMS
for medium-large scale
organizations with 15+
editors, several subsites
and complex workflow
needs

25. Plone rocks like no other
community on this planet

26. opensourcehacker.com Open Source Hacker
mikko@redinnovation.commoo9000