Photographer: - / Illustration by Lia Avant

Joel Burton

Well, we haven't had any problem getting people interested--we've had about 50 people sign up on our website as members. The normal challenges for a users group, though, are always the routine stuff: getting speakers confirmed, getting reminder emails out, and making sure the room is scheduled. We've been lucky to have a host organization (Porter Novelli) that's been able to offer us great space in a good location, and we don't have to lug a projector or sodas or things like that to our meetings.

We've had about 10-18 people show up for the meetings. After introductions and some general Python conspiring, we've had a mini-presentation and a main presentation at our meetings. The mini-presentations are usually someone talking quickly about a new product they've tried, or a Plone add-on they like, or things like that. The main presentations have been longer and a bit meatier; these have been things like Archetypes (a CMF/Plone technology for creating content types) or Metaclasses (a particularly cool corner of Zope's object machinery).

There has been lots of interest in Plone--so much so that I wonder if we shouldn't have called ourselves the Zope/Python/Plone Users Group. Archetypes and Plone skinning are the highest rated things on our poll of interesting topics but our presentation on metaclasses was probably my favorite.

I discovered Zope in late 1999, and, like everyone else, thought the through-the-web interface was amazing. I set about teaching Zope to Washington, DC nonprofit organizations in 2000, hoping to help them create a network where they could exchange products that they could find mutually useful.

Plone, and all of its many fantastic add-ons. It's been amazing to see how quickly Plone has grown into a top-notch content management system. Some of the Plone products that I always use are Archetypes, CMFMember, PloneSiteMap, and some of the polling and forum products.

Right now, Zope and Plone need a good, well-documented, enterprise-ready versioning solution. We have several contenders, and I'm hoping that one shakes out as the clear winner.

I wonder myself. Sometimes, with Zope, you use such a small part of Python, it's easy to lose sight of other cool things going on. I have been playing with lots of the new 2.3 features, though, and have been eagerly looking forward to Zope 2.8, which should allow for the use of new-style-classes in Zope. That should really help bridge the advanced-Python and Zope audiences.

I'd like to see articles about the best practices for building Zope and Plone sites in ZopeMag. There's always a lot of focus on which products to install or what technical tricks to pull, but I think we could really use some information on building a solid, well-planned site using the sort of development standards attractive to businesses.

For Py, I always love to see information on useful libraries and on the use of object-oriented techniques for good design. And I'd love to see something on Twisted, too--we've had real interest in ZPUG on Twisted, and I don't think that everyone in the community understands what an amazing piece of software it is. [Py Editor's Note: We have in fact published an article on Twisted. It's freely available here.]