Matt Bowen, Alex Clark and the amazing Plone Conference 2008 team have announced the 50+ talks that they’ve chosen for Plone Conference 2008.

It’s a pretty amazing batch of talks, chosen from over 100 community-submitted proposals, and aimed at the full range of Plone experience levels. I got a chance to read all the proposals as a reviewer, and I can promise you this: when you show up at the conference you’re going to have a hard time choosing which talks to attend.

Some talks I’m looking forward to not missing include:

• Alexander Limi: The Future of Plone’s User Experience
• Rob Porter: Theming a Plone 3.1 site from start to finish
• Chris Calloway: What You Need To Know About Python
• Katie Cunningham: NASAScience: the Science Mission Directorate’s Makeover
• Matt Lee: Plone as a campaigns management platform

I’m also especially pleased that all of my Plone-developing colleagues at ONE/Northwest had their talk proposals accepted, so keep an eye out for:

• Andrew Burkhalter:  Hybrid Vigor: Plone + Salesforce Integration
• Jon Baldivieso: Collective Good: Best Practices for Creating, Releasing and Maintaining Add-on Products for Plone
• David Glick: When Good Code Goes Bad: Tools and Techniques for Troubleshooting Plone
• Veda Williams: Cat-Herding for Plone: Organizing and Executing a Successful Remote Sprint

If you’ve been waiting to see the talk list before registering, you’re out of excuses!  And, early bird registration ends August 8th, so register this week to save $50!

See you in DC!

Just a quick reminder that Plone Conference 2008 session proposals are due July 21st — six short days from now.

If you’ve got a Plone-related skill to teach, a cool project to do a case study about, wisdom about project and business management, or a conversation you’d like to facilitate in the community, take 15 minutes to put together a session proposal! Open source isn’t just about code, it’s about community knowledge sharing, and Plone Conference is what we all make it together!

Here’s where you can submit your proposal!

A few random ideas for talks I’d like to see at Plone Conference 2008.  In case anybody needs some inspiration.  Chime in with your ideas!  Name names!  Even better, propose one of these talks!  (Note: there are probably lots of talks I’d love to see that aren’t on this list, I just couldn’t think of them on the flight home from New Orleans!)

Non-technical

• Selling Plone: A Hands-on marketing workshop with Mark Corum
• Plone Foundation open-house: Foundation board members take questions.  Need a moderator(?)
• State of Plone keynote: Alex & Alan.
• Consulting practice management panel — focus on small to medium-sized integrators and how they can grow and succeed.
• PloneGov overview — focus: how can it be a model for Americans?  Xavier, Newport News people.
• Plone4Edu overview —  Mike Halm, Chris Calloway.  Explaining the model and how to replicate?  Or pitching the Edu project to new potential members?
• Paul Everitt philosophizing about the community (?)
• Migrations and Migraines:  Moving UW Radiology to Plone – Cris Ewig
• The Politics of Selling Plone inside large institutions – ??  panel?

• Theming Plone 3  – Plone 3 way — Veda Williams  (Also include GloWorm & CSS Manager)
• Buildout for beginners
• Practical deployment strategies for small organization or departmental sites  - Penn State or UW folks
• How to evaluate an add-on product

• Moving towards the core: an introduction to the Plone team’s developer practices.  If you’re ready to start contributing to the Plone codebase, this is a quick introduction to our community’s best practices.   Wichert?  Alex?  Martin?
• Brandon: intro to Zope Component Architecture (reprise of NOLA talk)
• Caching  - Calvin, Joel, or Ricardo.
• Intro to KSS: Joel Burton
• Plone-Salesforce Integration: Andrew Burkhalter
• Extending Plone’s built-in content types with SchemaExtender: Jon Baldivieso (?)
• State of multlingual support (Hanno)
• Making custom portlets the Plone 3 way
• Managing viewlets and viewlet managers to create customized page layouts

• Deliverance – Explained by someone who has good empathy for real-world themers.  :-)
• Import/Export – Martijn Peters?
• Design session: architecture for next-generation commenting (Martin, Chris Johnson, Jon Stahl?)