[Evangelism] PyCon Japan 2012 and Plone

Ken Wasetis [Contextual Corp.] ken.wasetis at contextualcorp.com
Tue May 22 15:11:07 UTC 2012



On 5/22/12 9:53 AM, Matt Hamilton wrote:
>
> On 22 May 2012, at 15:41, Dylan Jay wrote:
>>>
>>> One thing I did at a conference this weekend was to install Plone 
>>> from scratch during a 5-minute lightning talk. I can do it in under 
>>> 3 minutes. Basically running virtualenv, paster, buildout, 
>>> bin/instance fg. The idea was to show to python people that Plone is 
>>> *not* some difficult thing to get going with.
>>
>> for the record the talk I did submit didn't mention plone. It was 
>> called something like "zero to website hero in 30min" and was going 
>> to a complete themed site from start to end in 30min talk slot. Now 
>> I'm just going to have to do the same thing in a 5min lightning talk 
>> slot :)
>
> Damn... sounds like would be a great talk. Shame it wasn't accepted. 
> That's going to be a fun lightning talk ;)
>
>>>
>>> The question of whether trying to promote Plone at the PyCon-type 
>>> events is worth the effort is a fundamental one. I go through phases 
>>> of thinking its not worth the effort and we are banging our heads 
>>> against brick walls... but then, I'm not sure how else we are going 
>>> to get new developers into the community. We can work on the 
>>> business level and aim at business conferences and do case study 
>>> talks and the likes and hope that business decision makes choose 
>>> Plone and drag developers along that way.
>>
>> We need developers but they don't have to be die hard python devs. 
>> Python devs like making frameworks not themes :) Maybe we should be 
>> speaking at php conferences :)
+1 and that's a big reason I like going to a CMS Expo in our area that 
is more concentrated on Drupal/Joomla and other PHP-based tools, but I 
have one other idea that I think could create a few more converts more 
quickly...  Target the theme developers who currently crank out themes 
for Wordpress/Drupal/Joomla.  They can get a few more miles out of 
selling their themes, if they just learn how to roll the theme using 
Diazo.  The themes are already designed with 'includes' and 'portlet 
treatments' and are normally pretty good semantically and would work 
well with Plone.

I'm in the process of leveraging a Wordpress theme for a redesign of our 
company site and afterwards plan to contact the theme developer to pique 
her interest, hopefully, in doing the same.  Many sites, such as 
ThemeForest.com allow you to download the theme you've purchased for WP, 
Drupal, or Joomla.  Would be great if the theme devs start asking 
ThemeForest and others to 'please carry our Plone theme' and make it 
available for download as well.  I know this gets  into the whole 
commercial vs. OSS issue for our themes, but I believe the specifics of 
how to package Diazo-based themes has been hammered out and so long as 
the theme doesn't ship with extended portlets, viewlets, etc. that are 
already shipped with Plone, this decoupling is fine for having them sell 
their theme commercially (would need to look into those details of what 
was ironed out, again, of course.)

If we get 2 or 3 such theme developers on one themes site willing to 
migrate their themes for Diazo/Plone and then push to get them carried 
on a theme site such as ThemeForest, then hopefully other theme devs 
will follow suit, if they see/find there is a market (of course, they 
won't, if nobody buys the themes, since this is a commercial effort.)

But I do think the proliferation of Wordpress/Joomla/Drupal (in the 
U.S., anyhow) is greatly due to the great market there is for theme 
developers to freelance and make a living building themes for them.  
Many of them were probably HTML/CSS/graphics folks who didn't 
necessarily care to become PHP developers and probably will resist 
having to learn XSLT/Diazo a bit, but if the market is there for them to 
make a living on it, they will.
>
> No, exactly. That is kind of why I sometimes think that 
> Europython/PyCon is not the place we need to be promoting Plone. The 
> problem being I don't know *where* we should be promoting it in terms 
> of attracting new developers.
>
> Also, as a community we have plenty of our own events. If I was a 
> Plone developer and could only afford to go to one conference then it 
> will be a Plone one, not a general python one. Or put another way, as 
> an employer of Plone developers I can see much more value sending 
> people to Plone conferences than Python conferences. Hence often Plone 
> is not that well represented proportionally at PyCon-type events as 
> they are too busy at their own events.
>
> I speak at least once a year a the local university and promote Plone 
> there... especially the community. Showing them photos of all the 
> events worldwide and telling some of the stories of meeting people and 
> what they are up to in the Plone world is great. I would love to be 
> able to try and push that further and try and get more people doing at 
> more universities etc.
>
*+1* on reaching out to local colleges and universities.  A couple years 
back, we had a client willing to share in some of the management 
activities of a project, explaining requirements to students, explaining 
the kind of documentation they needed as leave-behind deliverables, 
checking their work, and only pulling our team in for initial training 
on how to develop content types, customize workflow, customize the theme 
and how to package it all up as add-on products.

Turned out to be about the same amount of work as if we had just done 
all the work, but it was good to get others (still in college) exposed 
to Plone.  These people go out into the workforce and perhaps then their 
projects call for features that their current CMS of choice cant handle, 
they'll remember this tool called Plone that was easy to get things 
working in and that shipped with great workflow and permissions 
management built-in.

We also gained a team member for a year from this project (who we lost 
once he decided to go to law school, unfortunately, but you get the idea.)
> -Matt
>
>
>> NETSIGHT
>>
>> Matt Hamilton
>> Technical Director
>> Email
>> matth at netsight.co.uk <mailto:iain at netsight.co.uk>
>>
>> Telephone
>> +44 (0) 117 909 0901
>>
>>
>> Web
>> www.netsight.co.uk <http://www.netsight.co.uk/>
>>
>> Address
>> 40 Berkeley Square, Clifton
>> Bristol BS8 1HU
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-- 
Ken Wasetis

President&  CMS Solution Architect
Contextual Corp.
office: 847-356-3027
ken.wasetis at contextualcorp.com

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