Report from 2006 Plone Developers Conference in New Orleans

Just back from the 2006 Plone Developers Conference in New Orleans. The ride in from the N.O. airport to the hotel (downtown) was fairly uneventful except for the conversation with the cabby. He gave us all the scoop on what it was like for him the last few months.

However, colleague Kimberly Stone took an airport shuttle that traveled the back roads to the hotel, and that trip was more revealing. She said it looked like a huge bomb had exploded: Homes and business buildings were leveled, and there was a boat sitting high and dry in the middle of a road.

Downtown New Orleans had many areas of construction in progress, but overall everything looked pretty much the way it did at last year's conference, which was also downtown. There seemed to be fewer people on the streets at night, though. The bar scenes were, well, just like last year - loud and crazy. The hotel stay was just as it was last year, too - fairly uneventful and NO Internet in the rooms. Argh.

There were 2-3 FEMA people in the lobby of our hotel the entire time. They didn't look too busy, though. We had WiFi at the conference BUT it didn't work 90% of time due to some strange interference with another signals in the area and DNS problems. So much for staying connected while on the road. Good news, though, for me: I purchased a new cell phone that has Internet access.

The conference was helpful. I recorded the keynote from Alexander Limi and Alan Runyan on Thursday morning. I hope to post this soon.

For me the big ah-ha was hearing that upgrading to Plone 2.1 is a huge change under the hood. There was a lot of conversation about the difficulties in upgrading because so many underlying elements of the Plone UI changed in 2.1. What I came away with is a more conservative view on upgrades and a decision to put a halt to all new 2.1 activity, for a variety of reasons. For one, I learned that EnfoldSystems upgrades their clients only on major revisions. Meaning, they are staying with 2.05 until 2.5 comes up later this year. Makes sense.

Ok, I'm off to register at SXSW. Hope to see you there!

Tom