Well I just touched back down in Christchurch after returning from LCA2010 (opens new window) 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 (opens new window) 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 (opens new window) - we ended up having 7 come along, which was more than the number that indicated they would come along on the wiki (opens new window). 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 (opens new window) 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 And as the Plone packages in most of the distro repositories are pretty out-of-date, their initial experiences aren’t all to good.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 (opens new window), 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 (opens new window) in the Plone space.

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