EuroPython

The Zope track of this year's EuroPython in June was dominated by Zope 3. There wasn't only Martijn Faassen's and my talks on Five. Several companies like POV, Infrae, and Nuxeo were also show-casing their already running Zope 3 or Five applications. It was quite obvious that people were highly interested, you could tell from the many questions they asked. The overall message was clear: Zope 3 could actually be used to build stuff! The Zope 3 ECM panel in which I participated was rather disappointing, unfortunately. I think all of us meant well, though, but somehow didn't get a good angle at the subject.

I found that a lot of the "rock stars" of the community already gave both positive and constructively critical feedback on my book. That was very helpful. People that hadn't heard about it yet were quite interested, approached me several times to have a look at it and asked me whether they could buy a copy right away. I hadn't brought any copies for sale, though.

Plone Conference

The second big event this year happened just this past week in Vienna. BlueDynamics once again hosted the International Plone Conference and did a phantastic job. It was a great event not only for the social and cultural part, but also from a technological point of view. The quality of the talks was excellent and, again much differently than last year, a lot of them had to do with Zope 3. Jim Fulton gave a keynote on the state and future of Zope and Tres Seaver presented his roadmap to CMF 2.0 which lays out the path during the migration to Zope 3. Martijn again gave the general Five introduction talk.

I had learned from my mistake at EuroPython (too much talk for too little time) and gave a now 90 minutes long tutorial with practical code examples. The amount of interest in this subject was enormous. Why? Because a group of Plone developers is now being paid to migrate things to Five components and it is just a matter of time when this will be in Plone, possibly even the next version. I had certainly underestimated the effect of such a step: it was clearly the "domino effect".

The feedback on the book was again enormous. Many people, including Jim Fulton, gave me very helpful advice on how to improve the work. I'm very thankful for that. Otherwise the demand for books sold directly at the conference was again very high, but I had not brought any copies on purpose -- I needed to travel lightly.

DZUG meeting

As a roundup of "conference week", I went to Koethen for the annual meeting of the German-speaking Zope User Group (DZUG). I could only stay for the first day but that was enough for my personal highlight of the conference: Holger Froebe gave a newbie's view on Zope 3. Newbie may not be the right word here since he's been a Zope and Plone consultant for several years. In his own words, he just doesn't see himself as a "Jim von Richtershausen". LOL. So, maybe he would be best described as a Zope 3 pioneer among all the other Zopistas. Either way, he was exactly the person I targetted my book at so I followed his talk closely.

Apart from some criticism, mostly being of the "I wouldn't know how to do it better either"-kind, Holger had many positive things to say about Zope 3. He praised its reusability and mentioned that he's for example using the event system outside of Zope 3 to manage the emergency room of the hospital he's working for. Much of his advice for the audience regarded best practices in the learning period of Zope 3. For example, in the beginning phase he valued short tutorials just as high as books, he said and recommended my book several times (without even me bribing him!). Of course, in return I received in a insight look at the learning struggles and a much better picture of the Zope 3 learning curve. Yes, it is still too steep... but Holger gave me lots of good advice on how to make it less steep and I thank him for that.