Just read the schedule, 16 talks with most of the hot topics on Plone community: Diazo, Dexterity, Transmogrifier, Scalability, Caching, development tools for Plone, success stories, etc. Same with speakers, we'll have developers comming from Argentina, Brazil, United States and more.

But the best is for the end, on October 1st, Python and Plone community will have the first "Caipirinha with Zope Sprint". During that day, we'll work to migrate ZTK components to Python 3 and to integrate webob With Zope.

You're invited, see you on Sao Paulo!

During Python Argentina Camp 2010 (PyCamp) i started to work on a set of tools with the aim to make Zope2 developer life easier. The first of those is a ZodbBrowser. On that time the idea was to build something like:

Right now ZodbBrowser let's you browse the whole ZODB content tree and for every object you can get:

• Its class and ancestors source code.

• Its attributes values and callables source code

• Its Interface class source code

These are the features included on the 0.1 experimental version release. Although there are many fixes and improvements to do, there's a minimal set of features working enough to go ahead with a experimental version for testing and to get feedback from community.

Watch it working

Try it!

If you already have a buildout for Zope2.13 or Plone4 running, edit buildout.cfg to add zope2.zodbbrowser to eggs and zcml sections at buildout and instance parts respectively.

[buildout]
...
eggs = zope2.zodbbrowser
...
[instance]
...
zcml = zope2.zodbbrowser

Then run bin/buildout to make the changes effective. To access zodbbrowser add /zodbbrowser in your zope instance url, for example: http://localhost:8080/zodbbrowser.

Acknowledgments

ZodbBrowser wouldn't be possible without the support and help of Python and Plone Community, PyCamp and the 2nd Plone Symposium South America, where it was held the last sprint and i attended to Steve McMahon's JQuery training where i got the "magic knowledge" to get this idea working.

Feedback and issues

If you find an issue you can report it at http://code.google.com/p/zodbbrowser. As always, comments, ideas and questions are very welcome!.

After three editions working on World Plone Day, I decided it's time to handover the challenge. If You're a person who likes to think global and act local, have new ideas about global Plone promotion, just have time or You like to get fun promoting Plone, this call is for You.

Organizing WPD is simpler than you imagine. The most difficult part of the job is to agree a good date suitable for most members of community. Once you get that, You must remember dates, keep track of local hosts, promote the event, make a list of the hosts and so on. If this sounds hard, don't worry, most of the job have reusable material and it's public available at http://www.coactivate.org/projects/plone-marketing/project-home (see bottom WPD).

How to Apply

Simple, send me a mail to rallende at menttes dot com and answer:

• Why you want to be the WPD Champion,
• What are your plans for WPD

Proposals will be received until October 17th.

Why am I making the change

Organizing World Plone Day is a great experience and I believe it really worth to share it. Also, there are new activities to promote Plone that I want to try so i've to make choices, but if no one is interested, don't worry I'm going to keep moving WPD forward until I find someone or We don't have at least one host with at least one speaker and one person listen to him/her :).

As a WPD Champion You're going to meet and get the support of many awesome people, don't miss the opportunity, You only have to send a mail to start the adventure.

Although PSSA is a Sotuh American regional event, many people from other regions answered and showed their interest to come. We're planning to have talks and activities in Spanish, Portuguese and English. Speaking Spanish is not a must to come and enjoy PSSA.

Plone Experience

During last years, Plone Community had grown in South America. We had very big and important projects, students takin part on core development programs such as Google Summer of Code and recently, the first Plone book written in the region had been published. This grow may be reflectted on potential attendees' experience:

Preferred topics

If technical level grows, so do they topics preferences, moving to more advanced ones.

Survey still open, You are invited to answer and come to Cordoba

These results are not closed yet, the survey will remain open, so you can let us know your preferences. If you're planning to come, please take five minutes to share your opinion and help us make the best PSSA ever. The survey is available at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/pssa2010. And of course, You are invited to follow news and updates about the Symposium at http://plonesymposium.com.ar

When i was working on this new application (to be published soon), i was following several documentation, including Zope Book. Reading the Zope Book i had the feeling ZMI was a great tool to accomplish tasks TTW. If I'm not wrong, that was the idea on the beginning, ie to develop ttw. During last years, with Zope3, Five and so on, Zope development became more through the file system and although ZMI may be a great tool for system administration/maintenance, and considering also there are third party products to assist developers, specially in Plone such as clouseau, gloworm. Sometimes i remember my sources as developer (ie Smalltalk) and i miss a good set of tools to assist me.

The tools i'm talking about might be at least:

• System or Class Browser (see example here and here)
• ZODB Browser
• ZTK Component Browser (ie something to see in Zope a list of registered components, utilities, viewlet managers and so on)

Let's do it

Why not ?.

During next 3 days it's going to be held Python Argentina (PyAr) Camp (aka PyCamp) in Veronica, Buenos Aires, and I plan to work on this idea. I don't pretend to do anything new necessarily. I'm already aware there are products that offers some of the features of the case, so the first thing to do is to research and take a look at them (Friday morning). In the best case, the job to be done might turn these tasks into documentation and defining a couple of howto as deliverable or deliverables might be a long todolist as a worst case. I'm not to ambitious neither, you can't do magic in just one weekend but my plans is to have a deliverable for this Sunday so, if you have any suggestion, advice, comment, do or don'ts, ideas, inspiration-source or anything else i'd appreciate a lot you share them in a comment here. Also if you're interested to join on this crazy crusade, we're going to meet at #pyar channel at irc.freenode.net during next 3 days.

Our company organized the Sao Paulo WPD editions for 2008 and 2009. On the first edition we used a usual approach hosting the event in a hotel and inviting few customers and prospects. Talks were all streamed on UStream.tv, which gave us an amazing response and mindshare -- we had guys like Sidnei da Silva interacting online, bringing the event to a whole new level.

On 2008 we basically invited customers and prospects that were close to us at the time.

It depends. On our experience, both times we put a lot of effort in order to make things happen. We, basically, spent 2 or 3 full company days in preparing and hosting WPD.

The results paid the efforts, for sure. Just to mention, one of the deals WPD2008 helped us to close turned to be our biggest customer on 2009.

We try, every year to make it different. Simples Consultoria is located at the largest city in Brazil and on any given day the city hosts a dozen or so IT-related events, so we really need to avoid doing the same as Oracle, Microsoft and IBM do or no one will pick our event.

What are your plans for wpd 2010?

We are still brainstorming what to do, but we will have another edition of WPD in Sao Paulo.

Watch photos from WPD Sao Paulo here.
If you've been a WPD host, you're invited to share your experiences as well. Answer these questions or make comments in your blog or just send them to me through mail at rover at menttes dot com.

In which WPD event did you take part as a local host and what kind of activities did you do?

In both, 2008 and 2009. In 2008 we held several simultaneous events, in Buenos Aires, in Cordoba and in Salta, and in 2009 we went to the city of La Rioja. What audience did the initiatives target? We mainly targeted the government and developers.

What strategy did you use to meet with people from these sectors?

For developers we organized talks in universities. At the National University of Cordoba, Emanuel Sartor gave an introductory talk on Plone. At the University of Buenos Aires, I gave an introductory course, for example. Other sites were free software events. In 2008 and 2009 events were held in Argentina that coincided with the WPD date and which were large spaces for dissemination. In the case of government, the strategy remained the same, to knock at the government’s door and ask them if they were interested in receiving a free talk from Plone. In 2008 we were able to do this at the Ministry of Planning of the Nation.

How much effort is needed to be a WPD local host?

It really depends a lot on what you want to do. Rather than think how much effort it takes, I guess it is better to consider how much effort I can put into it and plan on the basis of that. In giving a talk or demo in an organization, a minimum of effort is involved. NGOs and the government tend to encourage these kinds of activities. One can also organize one’s own event – renting the hall, printing the brochures – and it’s really interesting. But not always necessary.

And what about the results?

Our WPD initiatives were done with sponsorship from Menttes. In the case of the government we wanted to generate new projects and within the developers audience we wanted to contact potential collaborators. I believe we were successful with both audiences. And the effort involved was small when compared to other initiatives that gained the same results.

In your experience, do you think you have a distinctive characteristic that may be of interest to the rest of the hosts?

What I think may be interesting is how we administer our efforts. When one thinks of an event, one normally starts by worrying about the logistics: the venue, the talks, the catering, etc. When in fact what is central is promoting the event. In our case we made the greatest effort in disseminating the initiatives and organizing many small ones. The logistics we got from third parties interested in learning about Plone and all our organizational effort was directed primarily towards making the day, venue and program of the event known.

What are your plans for WPD 2010?

We want to organize a single event and bring together the local community in order to strengthen the bond with colleagues. In the second semester of this year, a South American Plone Symposium will be held in Cordoba and we plan to start visualizing how we want the event to develop.

Please pass the word around using all the tools you can think of: email, twitter, facebook, word of mouth, pigeon, owl, etc.

• To be able to choose one’s own timetables
• To be one’s own boss and not have to report to anyone else
• To earn a lot of money
• Because of an addiction to adrenaline
• Or for the simple pursuit of happiness

One of my first bosses, Don Ernesto Dominguez, believed and eventually convinced me that happiness consisted in achieving a balance between:

• That which we must accept in life
• That which we can change, which we commit ourselves to changing and which we eventually do change.

The Argentinian Difficulty

Now, the number of things to accept can be rather large in our country, because living here is difficult.

How difficult? Let us take a look at a specific case: setting up a business. This is the procedure by means of which a new organization is formed with legal and fiscal status. This procedure takes:

• About one day in the USA.

• One week in New Zealand.

• In Cordoba, for us at least, it took 21 months, that is to say, one year and nine months.

It may be rather an exaggeration to generalize on the basis of this specific case, but since we generally have to work with professionals and companies from abroad, we have really come to believe that living in Argentina is:

• 84 times harder than living in New Zealand, and

• 588 times harder than living in the USA.

So?

If living and setting up a business in Argentina is that complex, why on earth would we want to complicate our existence in this way? Because setting up in business is precisely not simply conforming with “what there is”. It involves taking risks to transform the reality that surrounds us, to create our own working environment. Redefining “personal happiness”.

Menttes

We founded Menttes because we wanted to work in a company whose production and business models were defined on the basis of Free Software. Because we wanted to be ‘core developers’ of a technology, working in what we are passionate about; in other words, we wanted to have fun in a sustainable manner, avoiding the task of having to restrict ourselves to solving issues that bored or frustrated us simply for the sake of earning money.

One of the pillars upon which we built the company is that each of us can choose how to work. Because choice maximizes fun – it fosters passion and excellence. Therefore, each person, regardless of their role or seniority in the company, can choose to work from home, choose his or her own working schedule, make decisions and have some bearing on the company’s future, even become its owner. All of this without sacrificing social security and job stability.

Limited Company

Today the company has clients in Argentina and exports its services to more than five countries for the government sector, for NGOs and for the private sector. It has established local, nationwide and international agreements.

Free Software

We believe we have become one of the Argentinian companies that has published the most GPL licensed code, with at least 11 products for the Plone Content Management System. Members of the company have taken part and often led the organization of more than 50 dissemination activities in South America, the United States, Europe and even at a global level, such as the World Plone Day. Company members have been accepted as members of the Plone Foundation and even named ambassadors for Spanish America.

We have been able to reach these accomplishments even while each member of the company is able to choose how to work and how much to become involved. Because Menttes is made up of a team of entrepreneurs.

And the difficulty?

The level of difficulty is a serious problem in our society. Argentina has about 40 million inhabitants. Of these, 18 million make up the economically active part of the population and of these 18 million, 2.2 million are unemployed and 4.3 million work in what is called the informal economy, that is, those without access to social security or pension funds and have no job stability. Therefore, only 11.5 million are left in the formal economy. That is to say, a mere third of the population.

Despite this discouraging scenario, we IT workers are a privileged bunch. According to estimates made by employers themselves, there are 35,000 new work places from one year to the next within this sector. However, only 3,600 people manage to graduate from the universities. This indicates the existence of a growing unsatisfied demand.

What happens in the IT RP market may not have a lineal relationship with the demand of IT services or of products. But I do think we can safely say that there is a margin or market. Compared to other sectors, I believe there is more space for entrepreneurs and it should therefore be less risky or less difficult. In other words, I believe we are facing an opportunity not easily found in our society: the chance for us to define for ourselves what our own happiness should be like and make it come true.

If we, who can do it, don’t – then who will transform our reality?

Plone is evolving. Future versions will support new and very easy ways to customize different part of the CMS. XDV is one of them, as a result of the maturity of deliverance, XDV let's you use a static set of resources as Plone theme using xpath rules. If that sounds awkward, believe me, describing is harder than do it.

At the end of Plone's theming documentation, the author encourages you to try it, after all "the best way to learn is by doing". At that point i found the approach easy enough give it a try and even if i'm kinda reluctant to explore new ways of doing certain tasks, i was very curious to test if XDV promises were true. I didn't spend to much time looking for a design, and i just picked the first one among a list of four:

• Invention
• Bittersweet
• Nonzero
• Transparentia

xdvtheme.inventions

The idea behind XDV is very simple, you put a facade in front of Plone. That facade, named theme, is built with a set of static htmls, css and js and it is wired with Plone by a set of rules that maps Plone's original skin with the theme.

Invention a two-column layout theme, is very simple and so the rules required to do the job, all you have to do is write a list of rules and voila, you get Inventions working in Plone.

In my case, i decided to modify the CSS because i wanted to clear the code a little bit. Although it wasn't necessary at all, sometimes it is easier to modify the theme's css than writing a rule, if the code is under your control you might do this, but that's not always the case as i knew from a Matt Hamilton's talk, where he uses deliverance to integrate a .net portal, Plone and Moodle.

The rules are stored in a file called rules.xml. In this case i need just 5 rules, one for the title, content, global navigation, right column and the last one to remove images in portlets, respectively:

<rules xmlns="http://openplans.org/deliverance">
    <!-- title -->
    <replace content='/html/head/title'    
               theme='/html/head/title' />

    <!-- content area -->

    <copy content='//*[@id="content"]'    
               theme='//*[@id="leftcolumn"]' />
    <copy content='//*[@id="portal-globalnav"]' 
            theme='//*[@id="links"]' />

    <!-- Portlets -->
   <copy content='//*[@id="portal-column-two"]' 
         theme='//*[@id="rightcolumn"]' />
   <drop content='//*/dl/dd/a/img' /> 
</rules> 

There are five kind rules: copy, replace, drop, prepend and append. Combining them with XPath expressions you manipulate each element and merge both themes. They're not very hard constructions and you can use two tools to make the job even easier. The first one is firebug, firebug let's you select an element and get the Xpath construction. The other one is banjo, following a post by Nate Aune:

"Banjo is a web-based tool which loads in the browser. The browser window is divided into three panes: one pane that loads the Plone site, one pane that loads the theme, and one pane that we’re calling the control panel. You simply click on the element in your Plone site, and then click on the corresponding element in your theme to “map” these elements together. The resulting mappings are written out as rules in the rules.xml file, which is used by Deliverance to insert Plone’s HTML in the proper placeholder in the theme’s HTML".

Performance

When I got the inventions theme working and I started to test it, I found it very fast. How fast ?, let's see some tests made at home. The first one was against my predictions. Using apache's benchmark tool i got:

So, using xdvtheme.inventions, the transfer rate is nearly the half than the default skin. It seems my machine needs more time to apply the rules, and even if xdvtheme.inventions requires to transfer half of data, 12,98Kb against 23,05Kb, the result favors to Plone's default skin since it takes 242ms against 270ms. Then, from  server side, default approach seems to be better.

Although the results I got with ab, I still found inventions faster in my browser. The key here seems to be that variable ab calls document length. Using YSlow I compared time to load the home page, data being transfered in kilobytes and per components.

Quick thought: length matters. Even paying the price at server side, Plone's default skin takes 3 times more to get loaded in Firefox 3.5. It requires more than 100Kb of Javascript, where i had no need to use js in inventions.

This remind me a talk gave by Joel Burton in Naples, where he started saying Plone is not slow, it just performs to many tasks. And I find these simple comparisons supporting that idea because we're comparing a general purpose skin, elastic, with editor and multiple layout support against a fixed-layout one, no edition support and it covers a very particular case. Anyway, if you don't need such general purpose solution for certain scenarios, now there's an alternative and it's easier and more flexible than existing approaches.

Testing, feedback welcome

xdvtheme.inventions runs with Plone 3.3rc5, it requires collective.xdv and a web server or Products.Reflecto to make available the static content. If you want to try it, just run:

$svn co http://svn.plone.org/svn/collective/xdvtheme.inventions/trunk/ themes

and then just follow readme.txt's instructions. Any comment, question or feedback is always welcome.

Resources

• Lipstick on a Pig, Matt Hamilton's talk. Slides with audio.
• Theming Plone with XDV - Limi's tutorial to get started with xdv.
• collective.xdv package documentation at pypi
• Banjo, creating deliverance/xdv rules TTW - Blog post and video, by Nate and friends.
• Deliverance Project
• Deliverance Demo and Deliverance Tutorial efforts at Sorrento Sprint - another implmentation for inventions, in this case using deliverance, i found this example after i  finished xdvtheme.inventions.
• Products.Reflecto - a tool to incorporate part of the file system into a Plone site by Jarn.
• Apache Benchmarking tool
• YSlow - performance benchmarking tool by yahoo
• Plone Users mailing list - thanks to Jon Stahl for the Reflecto tip
• Menttes' team

If it is not clear why we call WPD as 'a follow the sun event' you can red the World Plone Day twitter account and check how the post are being entered according the sun was giving the light to our Planet.

World Plone Day, a web 2.0 event

You can follow WPD2009 through the web at twitter, delicious, flickr and facebook. Just check the urls at worldploneday.org or look for our web2.0 tag: wpd2009.

Thanks again

Plone community is awesome, watching so many people working in the same idea at the same day, no matter the place, religion or belief, gives us and incredible energy. Thanks all the people who is supporting World Plone Day 2009.

Some of the talks that i won't miss are the ones related with Plone:

• Plone in the Cloud : an on-demand CMS hosted on Amazon EC2 by Nate Aune
  
• A winning combination: Plone as a CMS, your favorite Python web framework as a frontend by Carlos de la Guardia
• Giving back and helping expand the Python community. A roadmap for South America and Africa. by Kamon Ayeva and Roberto Allende

Non Plone talks to attend

After a quick read, i found some others that i would like to attend:

• Python 2.6 and 3.0 compatibility by Lennart Regebro
• Metaprogramming with Decorators and Metaclasses by Bruce Eckel
• Designing a web framework: Django's design decisions Jacob Kaplan-Moss

Evangelism and PyCon

World Plone Day, November 7, 2008
Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch

Thanks a lot to Chris for the gift and also thanks to all the New Zealand team who made an awesome job promoting Plone!

World Plone Day 2008

Schlepp wrote a very nice post morten report and during the meeting we approved it as the official one.

Since Donna Snow asked for formats worked for various events and how people drew more attendees, we discussed about it. Few words about it:

• Bristol and Pisa ran at the university and they were focused to students mainly
  
• Enfold targeted to companies, and its agenda seemed really nice

World Plone Day 2008 was a great event, just watch the photos at Flickr, the slides at Slideshare and the locations at Google Maps.

WPD 2009 global organization

Regarding  WPD 2009 there's no much to say but I asked for feedback about the event itself, the way the global team is organized and if it is good idea to meet again to keep talking about WPD 2009.

Bonus: Plone Eastern Europe

• publicize the Budapest conference, and the participation grants 
• on the long term, use this to organize consortia for EU proposals, since these countries are desired in joint projects and the more countries are the more chance for winning.