Photo courtesy of MrTopf
I spent last week in Budapest at the Plone conference and sprint. This was my first Plone conference and was just what I had come to expect from such a friendly, passionate and professional community. Plone has a strong sense of direction and there are some exciting things to look forward to. For me the most exciting developments were changes to the way Plone is themed.
Theming Plone is too tricky at the moment, and there’s too steep a learning curve. This is changing with a new approach to theming called Deliverance. In a nutshell, this lets you map parts of Plone’s output to parts of a custom theme with a very simple set of rules. It’s an intuitive way for a front-end developer to work and has caused a real buzz in the community. There are plenty of rough edges though, and lots of work to do before this approach truly leaves the hands of Plone developers and is accessible to Plone novices.
Deliverance has a couple of different flavours, both of which have their merits. One of these is called XDV and it uses the language XSLT to power it. I’ve coded XSLT for many years and am completely in love with it, so I’m absolutely delighted that it is now being used in Plone.
I was able to meet some of the key people involved in this area — namely Denys Mishunov, Laurence Rowe and Alexander Limi. I hope I learned where they see XDV going and how I may be able to help. I really hope I can contribute something useful, it looks like XDV is going to play an important role in making Plone more approachable.
I was able to show a few people at the conference the recent theme Open developed for WREN. Similarly to XDV, this uses XSLT so that all of the theming happens away from Plone. Unlike XDV the XSLT was custom made for this project. The demonstration went down very well and made me even more determined to make this powerful approach available to people without them having to learn Plone or XSLT.
A big thanks to the organisers and sponsors. Thanks to all who attended for creating such a great atmosphere. Budapest is a beautiful city, with friendly people, good food and delicious beer. I leave with fond memories and eagerly look forward to the next time.
