This talk discusses the future direction of Plone from the speaker's independent perspective. Some key points made include: Plone faces criticisms like a steep learning curve and complex documentation; its development and release process has problems; and it is not well marketed. However, Plone also has strengths like security, flexibility and its open source license. The speaker advocates focusing on simplifying Plone, focusing on content over complex platforms, and empowering users. Python 3 and modern frontend frameworks could help Plone's future. The talk aims to spark critical discussion about Plone's direction rather than represent any group's views.

1. Plone, quo vadis?
Alexander Loechel
PloneConf 2018 - Tokyo
All Images are CC0 or referenced

2. This talk is based solely on my personal
opinion and does not reflect the opinion
of the Plone Foundation or
the Plone Community as a whole.
To be a steward and director of the
Plone Foundation does not mean
giving up your own opinion or
basically speaking for the entire community.

3. Independent position
● public servants (University)
● IT-Manager
● not in charge of WCMS / Web
● Don’t earn my money from selling /
developing Zope/Plone
● computer science background
● result focused

4. “Which is the best WCMS?”
Web
Content
Management
System
⇒ WCMS

5. “It depends …”

6. But you are a
Zope/Plone person

7. Isn’t Zope/Plone already dead?

8. Not yet ...

10. Rich Hickey
10
“Most of the biggest problems
in software are problems
of misconception.”

11. It is time for a critical self-analysis
CC3-BY-SA - MOs810 - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sigmunt_Freud_house_Pribor_(sociable_monument).JPG

12. Critics and Complaints

13. Steep learning curve

14. Over complex

15. Bad documentation
● structure
● completeness
● Not easy to understand

16. Development & Release
Process with Problems
● No regular Releases
● Missing Installer
● Missing Translation
● Regression Bugs
● No new awesome
features

17. How does Plone present itself? (SWOT-Analyse)
● Plone the Product (WCMS)
● Plone the Vendor
● Plone the Community
Strength
● What are we doing right?
● What supports our efforts?
● What can we be proud of?
● Where are we better than
others?
Weaknesses
● Where are we weak?
● What is missing?
● What could others do better
than us?
Threats
● Changes in the surrounding
● Entwicklung des Wettbewerbs
● What’s risky for us?
● Where do we have problems?
Opportunities
● Possible chances?
● Future opportunities?
● Positive trends
● Positive changes in the
surrounding?
SWOT

18. Plone the Product

19. is a
CMS
Content Management System

20. Plone is NOT a
web framework

21. Plone the Product (WCMS)
Strength Weaknesses
Threats Opportunities
Very secure
accessible
stable
FLOSS licence
“boring”
translations
Ressource Registry
JavaScript Toolset
Python
few good maintained Add-Ons
very complex
Enterprise WCMS Platform
Python
Integrations Platform
scaleable
Concurrent writes
Innovations-driver
steep learning curve
Editor Interface

22. Selected Aspects
The good points

23. is a
Content Integration
Framework

27. infinite scalability

28. Plone Collections
→ Data Query

29. Plone EasyForm
→ Form Builder

30. Plone Rules-Engine
Event System

31. Content Framework
Dexterity
→ Data Schema

32. Plone
Workflow Engine

33. Diazo → Easy Theming

34. Through-The-Web (TTW) Development:
PythonScript & RestrictedPython

35. Empower Users
CC BY-SA 3.0: Nick Youngson - Empower (http://www.thebluediamondgallery.com/typewriter/e/empower.html)

36. Plone the Vendor
Strength Weaknesses
Threats Opportunities
FLOSS Licence
For continuity
Bad or non-existing Marketing
Professional Services
Not a company
No BDFLDeveloper Driven Community

37. How are WCMS selected

38. Most WCMS are selected based on
● Follow the herd (market share)
● Biased consulting
● Buying a WCMS as an add-on of
“design / consulting / provider”
● Personal recommendations
Who decides for the WCMS
has changed → not IT anymore, it is mostly
communications / press / marketing departments
→ technical considerations matter less

39. Gartner WCMS Quadrant 2017 Forrester Wave WCMS 2017

40. the Consulting Problem:
Those consulting companies only present
commercial Vendors, no Systems
Open Source is mostly / completely ignored

41. FLOSS phenomenon / dilemma
“Free software” means software that respects users' freedom and community.
Roughly, it means that the users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute,
study, change and improve the software. Thus, “free software” is a matter of
liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of “free” as in
“free speech”, not as in “free beer”.
FLOSS also requires money
Comparable commercial software costs
approx. 70.000,00 - 250.000,00 € / year license costs
→ > 1 full-time developer
But who is ready to pay for FLOSS?

42. A reasonable Selection
should base on
● satisfied requirements
● usage scenarios → User Stories
● economics
● strategic consideration
(technically and organizationally)
○ technical platform
○ Infrastructure requirements
○ Stability, Security &
Governance
○ Professional support
○ available Add-Ons
○ Requirements for editors,
administrators & developers

43. Web → WCMS only?

45. competitors / segments / focus
We should ask ourselves which should be
our target audience / segment and focus

47. Vendors Web Content & Experience Management

48. Digital Experience Platform / WCMS Dilemma:
Platforms offer flexibility
But most institutions could not handle
Under-buy / Over-buy Problem
Technology Capability Spectrumlow high
vendors
promise
real capabilities
of the vendor
Institutional
skills
Capacity Gap Hyperbole Gap
real capabilities
of the vendor
Capacity Gap
@TonyByrne @RSG
Skill set of a CMS user (editors, administrators, integrators)

49. Platform vs. Product
Platform:
For a Vendor a platform is always better → larger Market
Developers could build scoped applications
Product:
For a consumer a Product is always better → solves my problem
Products solving specific Use-Cases directly
Platform Possibilities Product
more complexity, costs, time less

50. Mid-Range
Products

51. Mid-Range
Products

52. System / Vendor development
To reach a greater market
Mid-Range
Products

53. System / Vendor development
To reach a greater market

54. System / Vendor development
To reach a greater market

55. Distributions with a product character
(make complex systems simpler)
System / Vendor development
To reach a greater market

59. It is NOT a game of CMS

60. Focus

62. Content is King

63. https://xkcd.com/773/
Discrepancy between
provided information and
information sought by users

65. Complexity Dilemma
● WCMS needs to be so powerful that all
requirements can be meet → gets more complex
● WCMS should be easily to handle for editors
→ WordPress Paradox

66. Gutenberg Editor - WordPress
→ Example for modern editing
→ also a Design and Focus decision
→ Back to Blogs
→ First Function to deactivate in an
enterprise environment, corporate design
disallows layout decisions transferred to editors
→ Focus on Content

67. CMS are boring
MySQL is boring
Postgres is boring
PHP is boring
Python is boring
LDAP is boring
WordPress / Joomla / Drupal / Typo3 / Plone / ... are boring
Memcached is boring
Squid is boring
Varnish is boring
Apache httpd is boring
Cron is boring

68. "Boring" should not be conflated with "bad"

69. “Boring” let you get things done
Every company gets about three innovation tokens.
Source: Dan McKinley, "Choose Boring Technology" http://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology

71. Hype-Cycle

72. Innovation driver
and adoption rate

74. – Richard Feynman
74
“The first principle is
that you must not fool yourself
— and you are the easiest person to fool.”
Because you are a web-developer / IT-professional and it is easy to you,
that does not mean it is easy or understandable for others

75. The Zen of Python - PEP20
Beautiful is better than ugly.
Explicit is better than implicit.
Simple is better than complex.
Complex is better than complicated.
Flat is better than nested.
Sparse is better than dense.
Readability counts.
Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules.
Although practicality beats purity.
Errors should never pass silently.
Unless explicitly silenced.
In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.
There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.
Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch.
Now is better than never.
Although never is often better than *right* now.
If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea.
If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea.
Namespaces are one honking great idea -- let's do more of those!

76. The Zen of Python - PEP20
Beautiful is better than ugly.
Explicit is better than implicit.
Simple is better than complex.
Complex is better than complicated.
Flat is better than nested.
Sparse is better than dense.
Readability counts.
Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules.
Although practicality beats purity.
Errors should never pass silently.
Unless explicitly silenced.
In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.
There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.
Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch.
Now is better than never.
Although never is often better than *right* now.
If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea.
If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea.
Namespaces are one honking great idea -- let's do more of those!

77. Applies to developers
as well as for editors
→ editors don’t want or need the
most fancy tools they just want to
build awesome websites

78. Empower Users
CC BY-SA 3.0: Nick Youngson - Empower (http://www.thebluediamondgallery.com/typewriter/e/empower.html)

79. Plone the Community
Strength Weaknesses
Threats Opportunities
GSoC
Lots of Innovations-Token
Average age
Community Mix
decreasing number
Very pleasant operating/communication environment
Relatively small (around 200 active)
Lot of innovative developers
Developer Community
Sprints
Very smart people

80. Brandon Rhodes
Intro to Plone Keynote PyCon 2016

81. Paul Everett - Introducing Jim
Fulton @PloneConf2016

85. Some of the smartest persons
on earth you can meet and talk to
“You do not get a handshake,
you get a hug”
Chrissy Wainwright

86. 1. 2003 October 15 - 17 New Orleans, USA
2. 2004 September 20 - 23 Vienna, Austria
3. 2005 September 19 - 21 Vienna, Austria
4. 2006 October 25 - 27 Seattle, WA USA
5. 2007 October 8 - 12 Naples, Italy
6. 2008 October 6 - 12 Washington D.C. USA
7. 2009 October 28 - 30 Budapest, Hungary
8. 2010 October 25 - 31 Bristol, UK
9. 2011 November 1 - 8 San Francisco CA USA
10. 2012 October 8 - 14 Arnhem, Netherland
11. 2013 October 2 - 4 Brasilia, Brazil
12. 2014 October 29 - 31 Bristol, UK
13. 2015 October 12 - 18 Bucharest, Romania
14. 2016 October 17 - 23 Boston MA USA
15. 2017 October 18 - 20 Barcelona, Spain
16. 2018 November 5 - 11 Tokyo, Japan
17. 2019 ??? (no proposal)
< 70 Tickets for PloneConf 2018

87. Necessary
vs
Important
vs
Fun

88. - Bram Cohen
"The trick is to fix the problem you have,
rather than the problem you want."

89. End of Life for Python 2 (2.7) by 2020-01-01
→ Plone on Python 3 is a necessity
8
9

90. Empower Users
CC BY-SA 3.0: Nick Youngson - Empower (http://www.thebluediamondgallery.com/typewriter/e/empower.html)

91. User Experience
is about simplified
user Interfaces

92. Plone-React → Volto

93. “rapid turnaround”
(Video Better Web App Development by Sean Kelly https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWODIO6aCUE von 2006, NASA)

95. - Pete Cordell
"Telling a programmer
there's already a library to do X
is like telling a songwriter
there's already a song about love."

96. A complex system that works is invariably
found to have evolved from a simple system
that worked. The inverse proposition also
appears to be true: A complex system
designed from scratch never works and cannot
be made to work. You have to start over,
beginning with a working simple system.
Source: "John Gall's law" - from "Systemantics: How Systems Really Work and How They Fail" - 1975

97. Bjarne Stroustrup
97
“If you think it’s simple,
then you have
misunderstood the problem.”

98. 98
Peter Drucker
The best way
to predict the future
is to create it.

99. You can take the man out of Plone
But you could not take the Plone out of the man
Source: Laurence Rowe - Plone Open Garden 2015 - Sorrento

100. Plone will life on,
there’s more to come