Talks
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We have lined up talks and demos of particular interest in the digital experience age. The conference will cover a variety of Python web technologies in addition to Plone and will have plenty to offer to users, integrators, developers, and designers.
View the schedule for the complete list of talks
Please give us feedback on the talks you attend!
Keynotes
Each morning we will come together in the MIT Media Lab's Bartos Theater for keynote talks, and we're very excited about the keynotes we have lined up.
PYTHON WEB TECHNOLOGIES - Brandon Rhodes, who has been using Python since 1997 or 1998 (the exact year has been lost to history) and is this year's Pycon chair, will share his perspective on the past, present, and future of Python for the Web.
THE SUPER INTEGRATOR - Annette Lewis, who has created dozens of departmental and group Plone sites at Penn State University, will walk us through the process she uses to go from design comps to finished site in 2 weeks - with everything done through the web.
PLONE FUTURES - Eric Steele, Plone's esteemed release manager since the early days of Plone 4, will talk about the latest Plone developments - like the Rest API and the new approach to tiled layouts - that will make it even easier to support digital experiences.
Big Ideas
ACCESSIBILITY - Paul Roeland, president of the Plone Foundation Board, will explain what it means and why it's vital to your whole process, from design to devops to content creation and curation. He'll show how Plone will support you as you work towards the goal of optimal SEO, multi-platform deliverability and full legal compliance.
FILTER BUBBLES - Guido Stevens, leader of the Plone Intranet (Quaive) project, riffs on the links between knowledge management theory, agile methodologies, the cold war, and more.
DIGITAL MARKETING PLATFORMS - Ken Wasetis, of SapientNitro, will talk about how Plone fits into integrated digital marketing platforms that empower marketers with content-related capabilities such as personalization and targeting, data analytics, test-and-learn, and omni-channel campaigns across email, mobile, etc. He will also take a look at how Plone fits into a CMS + e-commerce and/or CMS + membership management integrated experience.
ETHICS OF DIGITAL MARKETING PLATFORMS - Ethan Zuckerman, director of the Center for Civic Media at MIT, will discuss the social, cultural, political, philosophical, and moral implications of these technologies.
Python Web
WHEN PLONE IS NOT THE RIGHT FIT - For web applications without a content management component, Carlos De La Guardia gives us a tour of the Python web framework landscape. He wrote the book on the subject.
PYTHON+JAVASCRIPT - Laurence Rowe will talk about graph based data APIs for efficient communication between browsers and servers.
INTEGRATION*5 - David Glick will tell us about a project that combined Pyramid, Plone, React, Elasticsearch, and Salesforce.com.
DJANGO+SALESFORCE - Salesforce.com can also be used as a Django database backend. Bill Blanchard will explain how to create a basic app that performs CRUD operations against Salesforce, and he'll review some of the "gotchas" that come with using Salesforce and the django-salesforce library.
AN ILLUSTRATED GUIDE TO MICROSERVICES - Phil Lombardi will explain key principles, costs, and benefits of microservices and show via a series of live demos and working examples how to extend a Plone/Flask/Pyramid/Django or any other application to quickly and easily benefit from migrating to a microservices architecture.
STATIC WEBSITES WITH LEKTOR - Static websites are back in vogue, and for good reason: they’re incredibly cheap, limitlessly scalable, and impossible to hack. In this talk, David “DB" Baumgold will explain what static websites are, discuss the tradeoffs between static and dynamic sites, and demonstrate how to get the best of both worlds by using dynamic services on your static website. He’ll also give an introduction to Lektor, a user-friendly CMS written in Python and designed for generating static websites.
APIs
REST API - The way Plone does real traversal (mapping URLs to objects) makes it a really good fit for a proper REST interface. Timo Stollenwerk will describe the exciting work done at the Barcelona sprint and the current state of plone.restapi, a high quality and fully documented RESTful hypermedia API.
PLONE API - Plone was built on a multi-layered stack with its origins in 1998, which made for a messy amalgamation of components each with its own API. plone.api was created to hide all those details and present a nice, useful, easy and intuitive API on top of them. Gil Forcada will will give us an overview of the API and the process used to build it.
JAVASCRIPT PLONE CLIENT - A key part of the work started at the Barcelona sprint this summer has been an extensible Angular 2 based app, which does all its interaction with the Plone backend through the new RESTful API (see above). It supports both server side and browser side rendering for fast response time, SEO and accessibility. Ramon Navarro Bosch and Eric Bréhault will give us the scoop.
THE HEADLESS CMS - It's all the rage. Érico Andrei does it with Plone.
Integrator Tricks
DEPLOYMENT SHOWDOWN - Sven Strack will host a live competition to see how many different cloud platforms entrants can deploy a working Plone instance on in 15 minutes. Start practicing people!
MAKING EVERYONE HAPPY - Jeff Bowman will show us how Plone+Salesforce help The Mountaineers, a diverse, volunteer-driven nonprofit, keep pace in the digital age.
For Developers
PLONE.SERVER - Another outcome of the Barcelona sprint was an experimental new approach to Plone's backend: running the Dexterity content framework directly on the ZTK (Zope Toolkit) and publishing it with an aiohttp-based HTTP server. Ramon Navarro Bosch gives us the lowdown.
PDB LIKE A PRO - Philip Bauer, leader of Plone's training team, gives us tips and tricks to using the Python debugger on Plone.
ZODB - Jim Fulton, father of Zope, will talk about recent improvements in the Zope Object Database and what lies ahead.
WEB DEVELOPMENT WITH VIM - Johannes Raggam, long term Plone contributor, will show how the Vim editor can be extended and configured to perfectly suit your programming needs.
Design Topics
DESIGNING FOR A STRANGE CMS - Doug Pfeffer describes his experience on the KCRW project of handing off a complex design to have it integrated into a CMS (Plone) he knew nothing about. The KCRW site won the 2015 Webby for best radio and podcast website.
THE TAO OF CSS - Lots of cool things can be done with CSS these days. Rob Porter will tell us about transitions, transforms, animations, cool backgrounds, and more.
DOGS AND CATS LIVING TOGETHER... MASS HYSTERIA! - Adam Gesuero and Kevin Brooks will explain how designers and developers can get along.
Demos
The conference talk schedule will include a series of short demos of useful tools that everyone should know about. Many of these will focus on through the web (TTW) functionality that integrators and content editors without any programming experience can use. Others will be targeted at developers.
TTW THEMING - Chrissy Wainwright
TTW CONTENT TYPE DEVELOPMENT - Calvin Hendryx-Parker
TTW TILED LAYOUTS WITH MOSAIC - David Bain
TTW CUSTOMIZATION WITH RAPIDO - Eric Bréhault
CREATING COLLECTIONS - Franco Pellegrini
GETTING THINGS DONE WITH CONTENT RULES - Cris Ewing
QUAIVE: THE PLONE INTRANET - Guido Stevens
HOW TO GET PLONE ON YOUR OPENSTACK CLOUD - Serg Melikyan
FACETED SEARCHES WITH EEA.FACETEDNAVIGATION - Alec Ghica
FACETED SEARCHES WITH COLLECTIVE.ISOTOPE - Paul Roeland
MANAGING MULTILINGUAL CONTENT - Peter Holzer
Lightning Talks
Lightning talks are 5 minute "show us what you got" presentations, often off the cuff. There will be at least one set of lightning talks each day. Use them to rant, praise, muse, show off something you've done or something you think we need to know about. You will have a microphone and video projector. The infamous cowbell will let you know when you've run out of time. Bring your ideas and sign up at the conference.