by Alexander Neumann, Jakob Kahl - October 18, 2023
The 2023 editon of the anual Plone conference happend from October 2nd to 8th in Eibar, Basque Country
The kitconcept team was present with 8 developers. Our team members gave plenty talks, keynotes and trainings.
kitconcept and friends having team dinner
Two days filled with trainings. Free for all conference attendees. This offer is unique in the Plone community and kitconcept team members were the backbone of the trainings about how to use Plone 6. From deployment to development to deep insides into how Volto and Plone 6 works.
Alok Kumar and Jakob Kahl did a two day training to help developers get started with Volto and React:
https://2023.ploneconf.org/schedule/training/volto-and-react
Check out their trainings online if you want to catch up:
Our colleague Érico Andrei gave a training about installing Plone on Day 2, the 3rd of October
https://2023.ploneconf.org/schedule/training/installing-plone
Víctor Fernandez de Alba is kitconcept CTO and the Volto Release Manager. Tiberiu Ichim is a Volto team member and one of the key contributors to Volto. They gave key insights into how to work effectively with Volto. If you have experience with Volto and you want to become a real pro, this is the training you should go to.
https://2023.ploneconf.org/schedule/training/effective-volto
https://training.plone.org/effective-volto/index.html
On day one, kitconcept team members presented two talks, including the main keynote of the day.
Team members Érico Andrei, Víctor Fernández de Alba and Timo Stollenwerk together with Maurits van Rees of Zest Software and Eric Steele of Salesforce presented the very first Keynote of the Conference titled “State of Plone”.
Our colleague Víctor Fernández de Alba gave a presentation about the challenges faced by the Plone content management system in keeping up with modern frontend developments and the growing popularity of headless CMSs.
Breaking boundaries: Plone as headless CMS
https://2023.ploneconf.org/schedule/breaking-boundaries-plone-as-headless-cms
Day Two was a informative Day, packed with interesting Talks, Panels and Presentations.
Timo Stollenwerk, Sally Kleinfeldt, Tiberiu Ichim,, Eric Steele, Eric Bréhault, Rikupekka Oksanen, Érico Andrei and Guido Stevens hosted a very interesting Panel about the Future of Search Algorithms in Plone.
This panel provided a brief history and modern examples of Plone search, followed by a discussion of what improvements are needed - both from a marketing and technical perspective. This topic was first discussed at the 2011 conference and it was interesting to see how opinions had changed.
Meanwhile, kitconcept frontend developer Alok Kumar held a Presentation about what makes a developer friendly Volto Addon, and how we as a developer ourselfes can improve on the way we develop addons for Volto.
https://2023.ploneconf.org/schedule/is-your-volto-addon-developer-friendly
Later in the afternoon kitconcept developer Rob Gietema held an intriguing Talk about Nick, a headless CMS written in Node.js and how easy it is to build a website with it.
https://2023.ploneconf.org/schedule/how-to-build-a-site-using-nick
Following Rob, kitconcept Employee David Glick shared some Details and Stories on hosting large Plone sites in a Docker Swarm Cluster.
https://2023.ploneconf.org/schedule/tales-from-a-production-plone-cluster
In this talk, Érico Andrei guided us through the feature-rich world of Plone Distributions.
https://2023.ploneconf.org/schedule/unlocking-the-power-of-plone-distribution-a-hands-on-guide
In the evening CodeSyntax organized a showcase of different local sports, including stone lifting, wood chopping and wood sawing. Timo represented kitconcept in this together with Phillip Bauer of Starzel. After that we concluded the day with cold drinks and Pinxos at the conference party.
Day 3 was filled with quite technical presentations, providing Information on the Cutting Edge Technology Plone has to offer.
On the third Day of the Plone Conference, kitconcept Employee Fred van Dijk shared the News on automating a plone Release and how to host and operate a small Docker Swarm cluster using Plone.
https://2023.ploneconf.org/schedule/how-the-plone-foundation-ai-team-manages-its-websites-with-ci-cd
After a quick coffee break Víctor Fernández de Alba shared the progress on the Volto-Light-Theme and its inner workings.
https://2023.ploneconf.org/schedule/volto-light-theme-volto-theming-in-2023
CEO Timo Stollenwerk indulged us in the Story of the Challenges of migrating large, goverment-owned websites into a Plone project.
A little later in the afternoon, Érico Andrei presented us with a better, improved way to test Plone codebases.
https://2023.ploneconf.org/schedule/testing-your-plone-codebase-with-pytest
In his presentation Rohit Kumar shared the progress regarding implementing a visual workflow Manager in Volto.
https://2023.ploneconf.org/schedule/workflow-manager-in-volto
The kitconcept team continues to drive innovation in the Plone community. Volto is the default frontend for Plone 6 and dominated the topics during the conference. We are happy to be part of such an amazing community.
Do you want to see Plone 6 (Volto) in action? No matter if you are a developer interested in Volto or a company thinking about using Volto in an upcoming project. We are happy to give you a tour. Just drop us a note.
Timo Stollenwerk is the CEO of kitconcept. He is a Plone developer for sixteen years and a Plone core developer for eleven. He is member of the Plone framework team, the release team, the roadmap team, the Volto team, and the CI and testing team.