Now that I’ve had a chance to recover from jetlag and get back up to speed at work, I thought I’d take a few moments to reflect on Plone Conference 2007, held October 8-12 in Naples, Italy.
Vincenzo Barone and the crew from Abstract Open Solutions were wonderful hosts. The venue was great, internet access was solid, and everything ran quite smoothly. Naples is a charming, rough-edged city with amazing architecture and fantastic food.
But what really got me was the electric energy of the Plone community. This was the first big Plone community event since the release of Plone 3 in August.  It’s been a year of tremendous change and growth in Plone, and people are finally starting to wrap their heads around the incredible power and potential of the new Plone, and its underlying Zope 3 technologies.
The thing that surprised me the most was how unified the community was around one big idea: in the year ahead, we need to take advantage of the power of our framework to build out a new generation of tools that make Plone more approachable for first-time site builders.
From the buzz over beers to Lennart Regebro’s amazing talk “What Zope Did Wrong (and what to do instead)“, there was a tremendous amount of excitement about the many ways we can drive more control and flexibility up into the Plone UI without compromising the safety, stability and manageability of filesystem-based code.
I’ve got a big laundry list of “easy wins” (and a few harder nuts to crack) that I’m going to try to post over the next few weeks. I’m really excited to see what this community can accomplish when we align our vision around a common goal!
I have a couple questions that I thought you could answer:
1. When will all the 2007 conference presentations be available (in pdf or similar) for download? All I see so for is a subset.
When will videos be available for the 2007 conference presentations?
For those familiar with plone 2.x, what is the learning curve for plone 3.x? How hard is the migration really if you have both 3rd party add-on products and simple ones you’ve made – for example using PloneSkinDump?
If you have 0 experience with plone 3.x and have a new customer with requirements similar to previous customers, is it worth the effort to figure out how to redo everything with plone 3.x?
Thanks for any and all answers.