Just to let you all know that we've got the following event this Friday. We ask that you send an email to meeting-christchurch AT nzpug dot org so that your name goes into the draw for our giveaway book (got one on: Programming on Google App Engine).

This time we'll really order some pizzas so please bring along a few dollars to contribute to this.

Details are as follows:

Date: 29 January 2010

Time: 5:30-7:30pm

URL: http://nzpug.org/MeetingsChristchurch/Jan2010

Talks:

• Michael O'Connor & Tim Evans (ARANZ Geo): "Geological Modeling software built in Python"

Look forward to seeing you all there!

Well I just touched back down in Christchurch after returning from LCA2010 in Wellington. Overall the event was worth every penny and featured a number of high profile speakers from a number of FOSS projects. In fact, one thing that really struck me about the event was the number of 'offshore' speakers (in fact delegates too) - people that I would never have an opportunity to meet or hear present otherwise.

This was my first LCA and obviously coming from a Plone background, the web-related talks interested me most. So my conference itinerary consisted of (in no particular order): Puppet, Ruby, Drupal (yes I checked out 'the competition'), Pyglet (hey it's Python), PostgreSQL, Git, Xapian etc etc.

Some of the Plone highlights included: the PloneBoF - we ended up having 7 come along, which was more than the number that indicated they would come along on the wiki. The really good thing was that 3 of these hadn't put their names up on the wiki so if all the BoF'ers had come we would've had about 9 there. There was a lot of positive comments that came out of the BoF but the most interesting comment I took away was from a Systems Architect (ex-Unisys employee) who mentioned that Plone has 3 categories of user: Enterprise who only ever install the stable releases and don't upgrade at all, Developers who are always on the bleeding edge, and Everyone else whose initial attempt at installing Plone is via their distros package management system (there's probably another category of user in here who downloads the installers from plone.org but this was what he said). And as the Plone packages in most of the distro repositories are pretty out-of-date, their initial experiences aren't all to good. I was thinking that as the Plone installation process is buildout-based, this would be quite difficult to merge with the package installation process of most distros. It would be good, though, to make contact with some of the volunteers producing the various Plone distro packages and getting them to participate and interact a bit more with the core Plone community.

Attending the Drupal tutorial also opened my eyes to the excellent 3rd-party package installation experience Drupal provides for their users. Users can install 3rd-party packages directly from the administrative interface and also search for and install updates for their currently installed ones. That is something we need in Plone! Drupal does appear to be going through some of the growing pains Plone went through with content types developed thru-the-web and difficulty in porting this content type code to other Drupal instances - an essentially solved problem in the Plone space.

All-in-all an excellent event and one I'd definitely recommend to anyone. LCA2011 will be in Brisbane in February 2011 (dates to be confirmed). As an aside, I also took away some tips for Kiwi PyCon 2010, which is looking to be held in November 2010 - hopefully we'll see some of you there!

I'm organising a Plone Birds of a Feather session at LCA2010. It'll be on Wednesday, January 20th from 14:30-15:15 in Civic Suite 3 (which is apparently in the Old Town Hall building). Topics up for discussion will include:

• Plone 4 and Beyond
• E-Commerce in Plone
• Interconnectivity with RDBMSes
• Plone Theming
• Plone Support in NZ
• Etc
  

So if you'd like to find out what Plone is all about or talk some nitty-gritty regarding some specific aspect of the Plone CMS, come along this Wednesday and have a chat (I have asked that those coming along also list their names on the Plone BoF wiki page or drop me an email, just so we've got a bit of an idea of numbers).

More information is available here: https://conf.linux.org.au/wiki/PloneBoF.