it's the little things, or stuff I took away from pse09

1. Don't write xml, export it‽

I think I saw four people in breakout sessions tweak their content settings TTW and then pop over to site_setup and export the profile to make pretty, well formed .zcml files. OK, ok, I get the point. It's very fast, accurate, and way less a pain in the ass than writing your own.

2. Everything I make gon be folderish from now on‽

I've sort of half been paying attention to the new content type story (a la occasionally checking the Dexterity changelog) for upcoming Plone releases, but it was a bit of an eye opener to watch limi's Plone 5 demo and see Plone's moving to a single, folderish content type. Out-effin-standing. Everything folderish make incredible sense, and I've been tweaking my dev content types accordingly.

3. Use more ZopeSkel‽

Again, small encouragements. jjmojojjmojo's demo capped a couple days thinking that I ought to get more conversant with what ZopeSkel can do. Somehow I had been missing the

addcontent atschema

4. People want awards‽

I've been working on a Plone Community Awards idea, mostly in a vacuum. I knew a couple people from the Board were interested, but I was suprised so many people not only turned up for the BoF, but had also actually read my very, very long draft. Unfortunately, the BoF didn't get very far before they shooed us all off to dinner. Putting faces and names together was very helpful, and we've now got something to go to the Board hopefully this week. When the dust settles, I'll do a separate post or five about the awards.

5. A couple cheers for the little guy‽

At a conference of about a hundred on campus at Penn State, you expect that a bunch of people would be attached to institutions or medium-ish companies, and that was about right. There was the WebLion/Penn State contingent, which seemed to be a hell of a lot of people, and there was the 6FtUp blackshirt army, too.

But, there were also a whole bunch of 'small shop' people there, independent developers or small biz owners, or single Plone people inside larger companies. It reinforces, actually, what I've been thinking for a while, namely that there's been a bunch of commotion lately about positioning Plone as an enterprise level CMS/platform, but there doesn't seem to be so much attention on the fact that many of us work in the small business sphere, and that Plone can be an excellent small biz solution. And, that small shop Plonistas have particular needs and challenges.

Interestingly, the Evangelism BoF did appear pretty heavily weighted with small shop attendance.

Based on the location and the expertise of the WebLion folks, it seemed right that there were lots of sessions devoted to what seemed to me institutional issues, though based on the attendance, there should have been at least one session about Plone from the freelancer/small shop perspective.