World Plone Day

Today was World Plone Day – an event hosted by the fans/supporters/developers of Plone to share information about their favorite python based CMS with the world. The local Seattle Plone crew hosted an evening session with some talks introducing the platform and giving a brief overview of where it’s used and what it’s used for. 

It’s an interesting platform.

Definitely a CMS first and foremost – where I’m far more familiar with Django and working with the web framework layer. I’m not completely unfamiliar with content management systems, so a number of components and expected functions were at least familiar to me, even if the specifics of how they were done was not. I’d previously always shied away from plone, mostly because it just appeared to be very complex. To some extent, I’m still right – it is. But it’s not complex to get started with it, which was really interesting to see. 

One thing that I was surprised about is the continued and recent surge (past year or two) in plone activity. You can check out the plone open source project details at Ohloh – it’s definitely got some serious traction behind it, and as I understand it that “plone” project is really only a portion of the platform that represents the plone core.

I’m not sure that I’ll be making use of the project any time soon, but I had a good time learning about it and meeting some folks within the local plone community. They’re a pretty nice bunch of folks.