Day 1 of the 2008 Plone Conference

The 2008 Plone conference actually started on Wednesday, and Monday and Tuesday were training days. I'll be blogging about those later. Unlike the last conference, set in Italy, this is set here in Washington, DC. Since I am not being a tourist, I'm doing most of my posts here in my technical blog.

First off, Tuesday I had suffered from my periodic insomnia the night before so this day was a matter of a lot of water, light eating, and trying to keep cool in order to keep myself alert.

Registration

I had volunteered to work the registration desk as part of my effort to contribute to the conference. I arrived at 7 am. Others followed shortly and soon enough plonistas began to arrive. In no special order I got to meet or badge the following people:

• Ian Bicking
• Martin Aspelli
• Alexander Limi
• Bradley Kuhn
• Tres Seaver
• Nate Aune
• John Stahl
• Most of the KSS team

I was not alone as a volunteer for registration! Also there was:

• Emma Campbell
• JoAnna Springsteen
• Steve?
• Paul Boos
• Amy Clark
• Matt Bowen

Keynotes

I drifting a little in and out, but mostly I was focused on the registration. I figured I could just catch up on plone.tv. Not perfectly ideal, but volunteering is good for the soul. ;) Then it was off to the talks!

Feed the Masses by Paul Bugni

This was about Vice a Plone 3.x syndication tool that lets you output types in RSS 2.0, Atom, and even RSS 1.0. It handles recursions and enclosures and much more. It looks like a wonderful tool for our efforts, but its not quite yet production ready. I may spring on it.

I like the Zope Component Architecture approach! Awesome!

I played timer guy for the nefarious Matt Bowen.

Theming a Plone Site from Start to Finish by Rob Porter

Rob Porter of WebLion presented on material I had just taken a 2 day class on, so in retrospect I should not have gone. On the other hand, I got a few gems and perhaps getting a reinforcement on the class was good. Again I played timer guy for the nefarious Matt Bowen.

Software in the Cloud Speech violates freedom by Bradley Kuhn

Awesome speech! The cloud is dangerous, because really, who own our emails and twits when we use gmail and twitter?

Usability by Ginger Butcher and Katie Cunningham

I did not go but visited. I have to say that I was impressed watching those two for just a few minutes. They NAILED it. They talked well, energetically, knew their material, gave good examples, and were having as much fun as two little girls in a sand box. They did an awesome job and got kudos from Alexander Limi himself.