Obligatory caveats

I bump into Veda at Seattle Plone Gathering meetings. I wouldn’t say we’re friends, but we are friendly.

BTW, the book has an online errata list.

Snap review

Buy this book if you’re working on any aspect of developing a Plone-based site. Even if you aren’t doing theming work, its informational goodies will come in handy. It’s written for the newbie-to-intermediate level, but I’ll wager that even advanced Plone site developers will learn a thing or two from this book.

Boy, I wish it had existed when I was learning Plone for Fisher Communications! Learning theming required absorbing information from many sources, with varying levels of organization and quality. Here all of it is in one coherent text! Veda’s an excellent writer who easily covers a lot of territory. I predict this book will be indispensable for newbie Plone developers, and a dog-eared favorite for advanced developers.

The first two chapters (47 pages) are an introduction to Plone, theming concepts, and theming tools. I was puzzled that Veda didn’t include Emacs, the world’s greatest editor, in the text editor section. Hopefully God will forgive her. Chapter 3 tells you how to set up your development environment, and will be enormously beneficial to Plone newbies.

Then the remainder walks the reader through theming, from soup to nuts. Generally excellent all the way through. I particularly like how the chapters devoted to styling mechanics break it down by the different areas on a typical web page.

The section about add-on tools justifies the purchase price all by itself. Well maybe that’s being hyperbolic. But it’s still a must-read. As is the chapter devoted to the future of Plone theming, collective.xdv.

Nits

While the chapter on ZPT and TAL is a great introduction, anyone doing non-trivial work will need to read the TAL documentation and other ZPT tutorials. Those topics are sufficiently complex as to merit their own books.

The book occasionally dwells too much on how things used to be done. There’s some value in providing a historical context for how things are today, but going past a point can distract the reader. I think the Plone theming landscape is sufficiently complicated without descriptions of how things were done in Plone 2; but this is a personal preference, and of course it’s trivial to skip over such paragraphs if they’re also not your cup of tea.

Fifteen – 20 people were physically present, with another 10 watching via Brian Gershon‘s ustream.tv wizardry. (It was lower quality than a separate camcorder recording, due to a ustream.tv bug.) After Jon Stahl‘s introduction, Andrew Burkhalter, David Glick, and Cris Ewing previewed new Plone 4 technologies. Their talks rocked.

As I listened, I thought about what Fisher Communications lost when they killed their Internet division, which included shuttering our Plone project. I’m sad about the opportunity that Fisher walked away from, and the effects of inept management.

Fisher’s market advantages include a ton of content, the arguably most recognized television stations in the Seattle and Portland markets, and a relatively current infrastructure. Terminating a nascent program to revamp its existent sites into cutting-edge destinations was — how shall I put this? — witless. As for the implementation details, Plone’s superior capabilities will be turbocharged in Plone 4, while Fisher stays with Broadcast Interactive Media‘s Clickability-based templated SaaS product, and continues putting Band-Aids on the existing page layouts. (A little birdy tells me that someone within the company is arguing for switching from BIM to WorldNow, which would, if anything, be going backwards.) Staying with middling properties, when you could replace them with something great, is a shame.

As I contemplate my next career move, I’m wondering what to do with my Plone knowledge. At Fisher, I was (enjoyably) moving along Plone’s learning curve. My job search is now focused on companies working in open-source. Finding one that is CMS-grounded && works with Plone && needs someone like me would be swell, but is looking improbable in my timeframe.

So, whither my Plone knowledge?

Like most people, I leave an old job’s technologies behind when I start a new job. Of course, I continue to stay informed on technology in general. But there’s a world of difference between reading about release X of technology Y, and immersing yourself in it up to your neck for months on end.

But I’ve discovered that I find CMSs inherently interesting, and Plone is the CMS that’s most interesting. So I don’t want my Plone knowledge to atrophy. How can I keep my hand in, when I’ll be working, say, 60 hours/week in a new TurboGears-based start-up? I can continue reading Plone-focused blogs, but that will be mostly superficial. Reading will give way to skimming, which will give way to glancing, which will give way to no longer following.

I won’t learn, much less master, the new features coming down the pike. (Much less, master the features that already exist. ) I also probably won’t attend Plone conferences if I’m not working in Plone.

While listening to the great stuff scheduled for Plone 4, I thought about how to address this technology movement while working hard in another domain. I didn’t come up with any answers, so if you have a nugget of wisdom about this, do share it!

I appreciate the friendships I’ve made in the Plone community, and I also don’t want those to atrophy. I got thinking about maintaining technology/work based friendships in the face of no longer working in the technology domain that was their basis. Another challenging nut to crack.

After the Plone 4 talks, we held a raffle for a free ticket to Open Source Bridge, and most of these thoughts came full-circle. Here’s how the Open Source Bridge organizers describe the conference:

Open Source Bridge is a new conference for developers working with open source technologies. It will [have] five tracks connecting people across projects, languages, and backgrounds to explore how we do our work, and why we participate in open source. The conference structure is designed to provide developers with an opportunity to learn from people they might not connect with at other events.

[We] hope to answer a question: what are the rights and responsibilities of an open source citizen? As developers, we find ourselves in many roles; we are users, creators, and leaders. The Open Source Bridge team believes that our role as open source citizens informs our work whether we are conscious of it or not. Open Source Bridge is intended as a call to action to become better citizens, by sharing our knowledge with each other.

This dovetails into my vexations about remaining connected to the Plone technology and community. The Open Source Bridge mission statement resonates — how do I use open-source, and how (strategically and tactically) should I remaining connected to other projects and people? Technologies A, B, and C have singular communities, but also share a greater open-source community. I’ve tended to be less interested in the wider community, but this might be a ripe time to change that. Entirely different thinking may be a good foundation for staying connected.

As for the raffle, David Glick won the free registration. It must be arduous to go through life smart and lucky.

While I’m not personally interested in all of the proposed talks, they clearly have all had good thought put into them. Here are the ones that have piqued my curiosity:

The Scylla and Charybdis of Open Source Legalese

Using Open Source Principals to Save the Economy

Ubiquitous Angels

Open Source on the Farm

Perl is Undead

Managing the Passionate

Plone in the Cloud – deploying open source applications to Amazon EC2

5 things to know about MySQL if you don’t have a DBA

Assholes are killing your project

generation y, open source community building and the lessons that business is learning ( or should learn) from them both

Turn the Many into One: Using Deliverance to theme your web applications

Intro To Pydra – A Distributed Computing Framework For Python

Open Source Geographic Information Systems

Mercurial: basics to advanced techniques

Driving open source in the enterprise

Learning your authN-Zs

Making Twitter Suck Less With Perl

Open Source Tools In Computational Finance

Where’d my Files Go? A guide to Modern Ubuntu Distributions

Django: Thinking Outside The Blog

Agile Methodologies for Open Source Projects

Opinionated Frameworks for Opinionated Developers

Clustering Data — How to Have Fun in n-Dimensions

Open source: the business case

Layers of Caching: Key to scaling your website

Painless Project Estimation

“M” is for Manual: Creating Documentation for your Project

Web Server Shootout

How can open video become the new TV?

Bringing Newspapers into the future with Open Source

Mistakes We Knew We Were Making: A Cautionary Tale

Configuration Management Panel

The Linux Kernel Development model

Drupal, What is it Good For?

From Plone to Plinkit to Public Libraries

Write your own Bayesian Classifier: An Introduction to Machine Learning

Drizzle, Rethinking MySQL for the Web

If you’re interested by these or any of the other talks, then maybe I’ll see you at the conference?

Idealware's OSS CMS summary

If you’re interested in CMSs, I recommend this report. Here are some quotes to whet your appetite…

On User Roles and Workflow:

Plone is the most powerful system of the group in this area. It allows the highest level of control of user roles, user permissions and detailed configuration of the flow of content through the system. Drupal also has a detailed and granular system for user roles and permissions. Site managers can define custom user roles and be very specific about what roles have what permissions. There are modules that also allow permissions by node (content unit) as well as by taxonomy (content category). But Drupal does not have Plone’s out-of-the-box powerful workflow configuration.

On security:

Plone is the best of the bunch in this area: it has very few reported security vulnerabilities, and is immune to SQL injection attacks.

Its Plone summary:

Plone is a powerful and robust system suitable for organizations with very complex needs. It’s used by major newspapers and huge businesses, and it shows. The system offers a huge degree of flexibility and control, and it supports almost infinitely complicated workflows. And since the content admin tools are well laid-out and friendly, it’s easy for non-technical administrators to update text and images. Plone’s features are as strong, or stronger, than the other three systems in every area we reviewed except for one—Web 2.0/Community support, where Drupal came out on top.

This got me thinking about the new Plone-based CMS that my team was building for Fisher Communications, before Fisher cancelled the project. (Drat, and I had just gotten it out of my system…) I’m thinking about what could have been. It would have been so sweet. All I wanted to do was give Fisher a best-in-class system, which would have been the foundation for new, engaging web sites. Alas.

Download it for some good CMS reading.

At last count, they have 33 submissions on topics including Linux kernel development, Drupal, OSS project maintenance, Ruby, and Plone.

I’ve been working on getting the word out at UW’s Computer Science department. Through friends there, I got connected with undergraduate students doing open-source related research, like Scott Shawcroft. Scott put me in touch with Justine Sherry, the UW ACM student chapter’s vice-chair. I’m hoping we’ll some involvement from their CS student population, either for giving talks or attending the conference.

Andrew introduced me to Andy McKay, with whom I’ve traded a bit of e-mail but never met. It’s an oddity of today’s world that you can do business, or strike up a friendship via a few e-mail exchanges, with someone, without ever having actually met them.

Most of the attendees brought some food, and most of them brought breakfast food, and most of the breakfast food were doughnuts. We were swimming in doughnuts! Boy oh boy, there were a lot of doughnuts.

I left right before the last talk, as I was beginning to nod off. We were in one room for the entire day, sitting in the same chairs… I started fading by by 4:15 pm, and concluded that the better part of valor would be to leave at that point.

I particularly liked Joshua Drake‘s talk on Replicator for PostgreSQL. I’ve been thinking about database replication for a large Plone project at work (which is now on hold, but that’s a story for another day), primarily for redundancy, although the additional read performance would be nice. We’d be adequately served by two master-slave dbs. Open-source alternatives for this include ZEO RAID, and something like DirectoryStorage, with the underlying files replicated via a replication tool.

But given the importance of this particular database, I’ve provisionally selected Zope Replication Services (ZRS), a commercial product. It would provide a single read-write primary server and multiple read-only secondary servers, with automatic failover and promotion. As much as I support open-source, if database replication isn’t done right, you will have Hell to pay, and go insane and blind. 

But I want to stay aware of alternatives here, whether for OODB or RDB tiers. And the $16K ZRS licensing fees would be nice to eliminate…if I could be sure that an open-source alternative would not send me to Hell. At any rate, Replicator sounds like a good tool for PostgreSQL replication, and as I hadn’t heard of it before, the talk was a pleasant surprise.

If you’re considering organizing a Plone-related sprint, I’d like to hear from you, even if you’re not yet 100% sure. Or, write about it on your blog, so we can all hear about it. Or, propose a sprint so that it gets listed on the PyCon 2009 sprints page.

Update @ 1/23: Alex Clark waved his magic wand, and I’m in! I closed three tickets today for new blog listings! Yee haw!

I’m the new zookeeper. It seems like an easy job. And, a way to start contributing (in a teensy-weensy capacity) to the Plone community.

Tonight, I have, alas, a small problem with my ssh keys. Tomorrow, I should launch the “DeRosa era of zookeeping” by processing existing requests for additions to the blog list.

For the first time, just now, I knew how to find a viewlet’s linkages and guts. Without thinking, I went looking for the configure.zcml and common.py files… I’m starting to know what I’m doing!

I sometimes listen to music via iTunes when I work. I’ve rediscovered classical music, so my library has some of that (e.g., a London Symphony performance of Holst’s The Planets, a Boston Symphony performance of Carmina Burana), and more contemporary favorites (e.g., Yes, Traffic, B-52s, Poco, Nektar, and Dave Mason). I shared out my iTunes library — I’m hoping that others bring in their favorite music, and we build a shared library network at work…

Anyway. On a whim, I bought the only two albums (For Beginner Piano and Plock) made by the group Plone, from which the Plone CMS got its name. I plugged in my Bose headphones, cranked up the volume, started the Plone playlist, and began on a CSS task.

I found Plone’s music to be… Different. It was like nothing I expected. It’s… Unusual.

Andrew says it’s good music to code to. Um… Maybe. I don’t think it’ll ever replace Yes, Traffic, or Lou Reed.

———

Updated 1/10: I replaced the last sentence with one a little less impudent.

Location: Seattle, WA
Reports to: Director, Web Development

Fisher Interactive Network is a new division within Fisher Communications, and we need your help in changing the face of web news and information delivery!

This position is a founding member of FIN’s web development team. We’re using open-source technology to improve our sites’ sophistication and relevancy, and create new kinds of news and content delivery. We’ll need you to institute enlightened QA and code release practices. And help build this team’s culture.

The responsibilities will be to lead the QA effort, and own the release procedures used for build propagation. We’re seeking someone with experience in QA, but not necessarily in release management, because the latter can easily learned. We’re looking for experience in open source testing frameworks for web applications, and in Python, because it anchors our technology stack.

SPECIFIC DUTIES:
(Included but not limited to)

• Responsibility for all Quality Assurance, and our test strategy’s overall integrity. This includes developing and overseeing our software test plans and validation procedures
• Drive automated testing within the team. This includes selecting and managing automated test framework(s)
• Be the primary liaison to the Operations Manager, and jointly manage the QA-Production boundary
• Create and maintain functional tests; mostly automated, but also some manual testing. Review the test results for code coverage and regressions, and recommend corrective action

QUALIFICATIONS:

• At least five years experience in software QA, and a strong appreciation and understanding of effective QA processes
• xperience with open-source environments and tools, especially automated testing frameworks and technologies
• At least three years experience with Linux and OS X. At least three years Python experience, or four years with another scripting language coupled with a strong willingness to learn Python
• A healthy engagement with the industry and your trade. E.g., staying current with evolving and emerging technologies
• A healthy respect for agile development processes, continuous integration, QA, and release procedures

Contact me if you’re interested. My e-mail address is john @ this site’s domain.

Become more familiar with Plone and Zope. Heretofore, I’ve read, experimented, attended a Bootcamp, and attended a conference. I now want to become nuts-and-bolts familiar with them, so that I intuitively understand their internals. (Well, OK, so that I start to intuitively understand their internals.) This will come from touching many areas, rather than diving into just one or two.

Blog about my company’s Plone work. This won’t be easy. Some activities are confidential, some are not confidential but are sensitive, and some are OK to write about. A too-vague problem description is worthless, so, when should I publish something watered-down vs. just not write?

Contribute to Emacs (imminently), and Plone’s Documentation and Evangelism teams (it’ll be mid-year before I can do that).

Maintain a good balance between working on my team’s most important project (which is in Plone), and being a strategic resource for my division. I’ve hewed to being more hands-on here than in my most recent jobs, and I think I’ve been happier as a result. I could easily redefine my job as being more strategic thinking and advanced development, but I don’t want to. What I’m doing now is just as good for my company, and it’s good for my career. I must devote some energy to internal corporate technical advocacy and communications, but accomplishing concrete technical objectives is much more enjoyable. The pithy summation is, I’m happiest when I spend my day in Emacs and a terminal window, but I’m being paid to do “more” than that, so I’ve got to maintain a good balance. (If I sound like I haven’t figured this out yet, it’s because I haven’t.)

Build a great development team at work. Can I do that without being 100% management? I hope so. In the past, team building has been a source of tremendous personal achievement for me — I enjoyed being a forward deflector shield, and seeing them accomplish fantastic things.  But I’ve done that while operating entirely in “management mode.” Does this sound a bit contradictory with my previous goal? Yes. (IISLIHFTOY, IBIH.)

Normalize my family’s money situation. The TrenchMice years inflicted some, shall we say, disturbances to our finances. Regaining a steady income has, of course, helped, but some high-order TrenchMice harmonics are still rippling through our financial ether. I want to tamp them down within the next two months.

Lose 15 lbs.

The plural of CMS is CMSs. The possessive plural is CMSs’.

That’s my story and I’m sticking with it.

I brought five people from my company, and also forwarded the invitation to Joe, who attended and gave it a +1. Afterward, he, Jesse Snyder, and I had dinner at The Triple Door.

Both talks were good, and there was a decent amount of audience Q&A. Jon Stahl’s introduction-to-Plone talk was well received, but I thought it started off a bit too cerebral. It was based on Constance Wilde‘s World Plone Day Slide Deck. It hit all the right points, and of course Jon has a sure command of the subject matter. But the deck began ticking off facts with its second slide: Plone won an award, is OSS, is covered by the GPL, has a 501c(3) foundation, is XHTML and CSS standards compliant, supports OpenID, had only N security problems in the past two years, etc…

IMHO, this presentation opening could be better.

• Other frameworks and CMS (what’s the plural of CMS?) make similar or identical claims, and a listener can’t readily compare them in situ.
• A neophyte’s primary concern is, “Does Plone have the capabilities and quality for my site?” Like the old saws, “Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM,” and, “Nobody ever got fired for buying an HP printer,” a neophyte wants to know if they could run into an iceberg by selecting Plone. (Maybe not fired, but get jammed up six months down the road because Plone didn’t cut the mustard.) They want to hear that Plone’s used on bigger, more active, and/or flashier sites than their site — because that definitively answers the, “Can it handle my site?” question. A factual recitation simply doesn’t reassure on these points.
• Effective evangelism starts with an emotional connection. (Not insane or irrational. But, emotional.) The beginning should grab the listener by the collar and say, “This is Plone. This is what Plone does.”

I think striking visuals and commanding numbers would be a much more effective start. Viz:

“Welcome. I’m going to talk about Plone. Those of you who have never used Plone may be wondering, What sites use Plone? and, How capable is Plone as a CMS?”

First slide: Akamai’s home page.

“Akamai is a well-known global service provider for accelerating web content. Last year’s revenues were $nnn. They get about yyy page views per month. [If this number isn't readily available, it can be estimated from services like Compete.] They use Plone.”

Next slide: NCAR Earth Observing Laboratory

“This is the site for the Earth Observing Laboratory. They develop and deploy advanced scientific observing facilities. Their site uses DHTML and Flash to blahblahblah. They use Plone.”

Next slide: Brasil

“The sites for the Brazilian Parliament, the Brazilian President, and the Brazilian Government Web Portal collectively get about xxx visitors and yyy page views a month. These are official government sites that are used by an entire, large country. These all use Plone.”

Next slide: Novell

“Novell is a leading enterprise infrastructure software company. They get about xxx page views each month. They use Plone.”

Next slide: DISCOVER magazine

“DISCOVER magazine’s site gets about xxx page views each month. It contains every article of every issue since 1992. And, they’re categorized, related, and searchable in real time. This site allows DISCOVER to use blogging, podcasting, photo galleries, and video technologies. They use Plone.

“Now let me show you the features of Plone that make it so capable…”

(I’m riffing this off the top of my head. Someone can make a better version by wordsmithing this, and researching which sites to showcase. You’d want to demonstrate site size, features, and layout flexibility.)

This approach would bring the audience along more effectively, and juice up their interest level. It nails the “Is Plone good enough for my site?” type questions right at the start. After that, the deck can dive into the technical issues of W3C compliance, GPL, security, etc.