October 3, 2014

Upcoming talks

October is filled with exhibitions and conferences. So I am going to present three different talks this month.

Onkopedia - Ein Leitlinienportal auf dem Weg zum XML-basierten Publikationsworkflow

This talk will discuss our ongoing Onkopedia publishing project where we switch the customer to an XML-based publishing workflow. The basis of all publications are Word/DOCX documents that we convert to XML, store them into an XML database and generate HTML and PDF versions from XML content.

Where: DMS Expo 2014 Stuttgart, 08.10.2014

Structured content rocks - Integration of eXist-db (XML database) with Plone

Structured content (XML) is widely used in the publishing industry and documentation applications. This talk will demonstrate our approach of integrating XML content with Plone in a sane way. Instead of storing XML content natively in Plone we take a different approach and integrate Plone with the open-source XML database eXist-db. eXist-db is in some ways similar to Plone and provides an hierarchy storage model, support for latest XML technology like XPath 3, XQuery and XUpdate. Plone applications can communicate with eXist-DB both through WebDAV or through the REST API of eXist-db. The integration layer is provided through a small Plone add-on zopyx.existdb that makes provides out-of-the-box traversal support from Plone to eXist-db content, a generic API approach, ACEditor integration for basic content-management from within Plone. The overall talk is driven by an ongoing publishing project where we switching from an HTML-to-PDF workflow to XML-to-PDF with Plone as integration platform (https://www.onkopedia-guidelines.info).

Where: Plone Conference 2014, Bristol, 27.10.2014 - 02.11.2014

Why Plone is going to die!

​Plone is now more than 12 years old and has grown a lot. A burden of 300 and more modules and dependencies make the Plone programmers life a pain. My claim for this talk: Plone became with every version more unstable, more unapproachable and more unpredicatable. The whole complexity of Plone can only be managed and overseen by a small number of core developers. Even integrators with a decade of Plone experience have a hard life with Plone with every new release. My talk is the result of our 2014 Plone projects (legacy code and new projects).

I will present many examples where working with Plone become a major project risk from the technical prospective, budget-wise and developer-wise. Many of the Plone APIs are inconsistent, have a major lack of error handling or expose a lot of intern functionality (like the ZCA) that show have never surfaced. This is not a rant talk but it takes a clear and provocative position against the current Plone developer team. Approachability of a programming framework (or however you would call Plone) for developers is a key feature for success. In our experience Plone is a declining CMS (like many others) - it is also declining because of its complexity and many inadequateness. This is why Plone is going to die - because it can not attract new developers in order to survive in the market.

Where: Plone Conference 2014, Bristol, 27.10.2014 - 02.11.2014