News

Sixies had a blast at the 2021 Plone Conference, hosted virtually on LoudSwarm by Six Feet Up from Oct. 23 - 31. 268 people from 38 countries attended the eight-day conference featuring trainings, keynotes, talks, open spaces, sprints and social activities.

More than 50 videos — including expert talks and trainings about Plone, Zope, Volto, Guillotina and Python — have been shared on Plone’s YouTube channel. You can watch all of the 2021 presentations here.

While it was incredibly hard to narrow them down, below, we’ve included a list of our 7 favorite talks. 

Top 7 Talks from Plone Conference 2021:

1. “State of the Plone Community” by Chrissy Wainwright
   • The success of Plone can be largely attributed to the community who supports the Content Management System (CMS), gathers for conferences, and rallies for sprints. During her presentation, the Plone Foundation President and Six Feet Up Senior Python Developer — Chrissy Wainwright — takes a trip down memory lane with the Plone community, sharing photos from past conferences and giving attendees all the feels. Keep sharing your favorite #plonememories with us! 
2. "Plone 6 - Power and Control" by Timo Stollenwerk
   • Timo Stollenwerk, a Plone core developer and founder of kitconcept, surveyed various CMSs and concluded that, with Volto, Plone 6 is the only CMS that has both a powerful content management backend — and a modern, usable frontend for mere mortals. During his presentation, Timo shares examples of sites running Plone’s Volto frontend.
3. "Meet Quanta: Plone's Style Guide" by Víctor Fernández de Alba
   • The story of style guides in Plone started with Pastanaga UI, and now it has evolved to the next level with Quanta. During his presentation, Víctor Fernández de Alba, CTO at kitconcept, unveiled Quanta, the new look for Plone’s Volto frontend. Although Volto isn’t very old, the original Pastanaga UI has room for improvement. Quanta not only makes Plone look beautiful, but it also makes Plone work the way users expect it to.
4. "Why Relations are Awesome" by Philip Bauer
   • In this talk, a Plone core-developer and CEO of Starzel.de — Philip Bauer — showcases updates to the relations widget that make working with relations in Plone easier. He also included an example.py for reference that Six Feet Up’s Wainwright is excited about using regularly. 
5. "A New Hope for Migrations and Upgrades" by Philip Bauer and "collective.exportimport: Tips, Tricks and Deploying Staging Content" by Fred van Dijk
   • These complementary talks by Bauer and Fred van Dijk both covered collective.exportimport — a new tool which allows administrators to avoid a lot of the coding that would otherwise be required to move content from one version of Plone to another (or from one Plone site to another). van Dijk showed attendees how to move content from a portion of one site to other sites, and the rabbit photos in Bauer’s talk make it a must-watch! Bonus content: Wainwright has explored using collective.exportimport as a replacement for .zexp exports, which she outlines in this blog post.
6. "Plone 6 Classic UI Theming: Create a Theme for Plone 6 Classic UI Based on Bootstrap 5" by Peter Holzer, Maik Derstappen and Stefan Antonelli
   • In this 3.5-hour training, Plone developers Peter Holzer, Maik Derstappen and Stefan Antonelli showcase the active development and modernization happening on Plone’s Classic UI so that Plone will continue to be useful for a wide range of projects. This means that organizations with a large investment in their Plone sites and intranets will have the breathing space to make the move to Plone’s new React frontend, Volto, which is getting a lot of attention.
7. "From Zope to Plone: Thinking User-First During Migration" by Annette Lewis and Will Gwin
   • During this presentation — Annette Lewis, a senior Python Developer at Six Feet Up, and Will Gwin, manager of web communications at the Purdue University College of Engineering — described how they worked together to migrate 30,000+ web pages from Zope to Plone. “It was great to hear how Plone’s features made such a difference and freed up the College’s editors to do their real work, without having to fight code or a CMS,” said Six Feet Up’s T. Kim Nguyen. “One of the things we pride ourselves in at Six Feet Up is our consulting mindset: guiding clients through complex technical and process decisions, making recommendations, and helping them find solutions. I really enjoyed seeing how Six Feet Up’s team was able to provide exactly the right level of customization and functionality to address the College’s needs while not making the system overly complex for end users.” Bonus content: Read the case study for more information. 

Which talks were your favorite? Let us know in the comment box below. If you’re interested in more Plone news, check out the Plone Podcast, sign up for the Plone Connection, read our Plone blog and watch Plone Talks on YouTube.