DocComm Sprint - Wrapup

Winding down after a week of sprinting.

Well, I'd originally planned to keep a daily log of my experiences at the DocComm sprint, but that quickly fizzled after day 1. I'm sitting in Joel Burton's apartment right now, petting his sadomasochistic cat and settling down after a long day of wandering around San Francisco.

This has been an absolutely fantastic experience in every way. I'm going to be sure to attempt to make at least one of these sprints each year. It's been a great way for the WebLion group in general and both Erik and myself in particular to get our names out there within the Plone community.

The GetPaid Team made some really great progress towards bringing a simple and useful-out-of-the-box e-commerce system to Plone. Once this is up and running, Plone is going to be one truly-badass CMS. I'd thought I had my head wrapped around Zope3 application development before I got here, but this week has really opened my eyes. I found myself feeling completely overwhelmed on Day 1, but by the end, things had definitely clicked. Chris, Donna, and Veda made life much easier for the rest of us by creating detailed use cases and wireframes. Kapil has done wonders with this project and I owe him a lot for being patient enough to walk me through the application.

The Documentation Team worked some real magic with Plone's massive amount of loosely-organized documentation. The card sort was a thing of beauty and horror that, at times, threatened to plunge the world into a Post-it note shortage from which it would've taken us years to recover. And yet, in the end, it all just worked perfectly. The new docs front page is going to make life much easier for those coming to Plone.org for help and the fact that Plone 3 will be released with documentation already existing is absolutely amazing for an open source project.

I was pleasantly surprised by the number of higher ed folks I met here. I've been bringing up Mike's idea of a Plone in Education symposium and there's been a lot of interest. It's the perfect time for us all to start collaborating to promote Plone in the education space as well as generating new products to support that community.

To all of my fellow sprinters, it was wonderful to meet you all and I look forward to seeing you again. It will be nice to finally be able to "<insert name here>!" on #plone. Hopefully, at some point, we'll be able to bring you all out to State College for one of these things.

By Eric Steele on Sunday, July 01, 2007

In Plone | WebLion

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