[Product-Developers] How can we win the battle for developers?

Martin Aspeli optilude at gmx.net
Wed May 7 12:53:47 UTC 2008




Dylan Jay-3 wrote:
> 
> Are other people finding is hard to find good plone 
> integrators/developers that need work?
> 
> I just wanted to open this up for dicussion this has been something that 
> has been troubling me for awhile.
> 
> Will plone survive if people picking up web development for the first 
> time prefer php, django, rails or .net to z2/z3?
> 
> Why do we care?
> I care in the short term because its hard to expand a business without 
> developers. Clients face the same problem. If they are cluey their 
> criteria for picking a platform will included the availability of 
> development resources regardless of how cool the technology is.
> 
> but in the bigger picture open source survives by attracting new 
> developers. If there are no new z2/z3 developers then plone will die
> right?
> 
> oh and new developers mean cool new sites or cool new addons, which 
> means publicity outside the community, which means more work for those 
> who integrate plone.
> 
> So how can we win this battle?
> 

I think there are two ways to look at this:

 1. You can't find good developers because no-one wants to do Plone work.

 2. You can't find good developers because Plone is growing and everyone is
busy.

If you look at plone.net, there are over 250 companies that offer Plone
services. I don't think that's a sign of weakness.

Plone is never going to beat PHP for attracting college kids who want to put
together a quick dynamic website (not that this is all PHP is good for, of
course). That's not necessarily a bad thing, though. Most people who buy
Plone services also want to deal with professionals with some experience. I
think Plone has a place in the market for skills and investment, and it does
reasonably well there.

That's not to say we shouldn't do more to make Plone approachable to
developers and integrators, of course. The Plone Strategic Planning Summit
2008 was largely about how we do this.

Martin
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