MuSMo - Free Music

The Sorrento Sprint 2007 event is a conference, but a conference strictly for developers. Where developers all around the world, who shares common goals, come together to learn, code and fix stuff in Plone. Couple of months ago, the host, Vincenzo Barone from Abstract Open Solutions invited me over. Much thought went into it, and thought why not? It will be a good place for me to learn what the developers really do, how they work, and generally gain more exposure of the technical industry. Contributing whenever I can, I began to know more people than expected. Making friends along the way, I was peering mainly with KSS development, and being with the Belgian group to learn more about how Plone works through bug fixing. There were several talks that I’ve went for, e.g. Plone4Artists, KSS, and the works of ZEA that gave me a good overview of Plone.

Overall, the community is great! People are friendly, fun, willing, and passionate in improving Plone. With having a common goal that various companies, organisations, and individuals are working on - to make Plone more usable, it is no doubt great!

To me, it is the real world ‘University’ that makes a difference. Or rather, it’s a very large community organisation that brings mutual benefits for all.

One thing that was very interesting to see was how the Zope 3 architecture is blending into Plone 3 at the moment. Where new Plone Products are created purely in Zope 3 that is integrated into Plone itself. The benefit, hopefully, is to gain a larger community from Zope 3 developers and drive adoptations and improvements of the application. The main issue remains in the application design, on whether it’ll be purely integration, or a symbiotic relationship. I hope developers will keep in mind that integration is better than symbiotic in such cases. Care must be taken.

After much thoughts, personally, I stand that Plone does not fit to our use case. Though I have to say that Bilive.it is quite close to our use case. The amount of customisation and optimisation needed is not worth it in the long run. Still it doesn’t come up to par with the standards that I set. Plone isn’t fit for what it is not made for. From my perspective, Plone is very much fit for textual content, and less of media content. But I must say that Plone is also moving into the direction of catering artist websites, which is great! But since we aren’t moving in the same direction, it’s futile.

That said, this made me itch to contribute to Plone wherever I fit best.