On the off chance that you don’t grace the Plone list for NGOs or missed the training opportunity on plone.org and weren’t able to join, Joel Burton of PloneBootcamps.com and myself were asked to help N-TEN represent Plone in it’s “Ask the Expert” session. The transcript for the 1 hour session is now available. Check it out if you’re interested.
So, how did it go?
Personally, it was an honor and I rather enjoyed taking part in the session, despite feeling a bit hesitant about the “expert” labelling.  A few additional thoughts and reactions to the session follow:
- Joel Burton, of course, was his usual brilliant self at explaining complicated concepts in the somewhat challenging IRC format.ÂÂ
- Making the previous point even more impressive … my only complaint was continually feeling frustrated with the difficulties of articulating answers over the same format. N-TEN was using a web-based IRC client called Gabbly, which doesn’t support tab completion of screen nicks. It’s incredible how big a difference that makes to perceived typing speed
- There were significantly fewer blanket “compare Plone to Drupal and Joomla” questions than I anticipated. Those questions are fine, but without specific feature requirements and use-cases, it’s quite difficult to accurately represent where Plone definitely excels from a content editor perspective (besides the fantastic usability, that is!). Hint: it excels at everything ;^)
- It was a lot more of pointing people in the right direction to self-serve, rather than specifically answering their questions. The scope is obviously vast. We made a solid pitch to get people to the already incredible and existing resources that the Plone community offers including the lists and the #plone IRC channel.
- Hosting. I knew it would come up and it’s one of the more challenging ones to answer as it comes down to very fundamental differences to the architecture of Plone versus some other systems with which people may already be familiar. It’s great that we can point folks to Webfaction, High Speed Rails, Six Feet Up, as well as NPower — all of which credible serve the nonprofit sector.  Additionally, it’s great that your typical nonprofit can understand that the potential benefits of the Plone stack are worth the additional $10-20 USD/month, that sometimes commodity LAMP hosting has its drawbacks, and want to invest in their web presence. Despite all of this, I still think there’s an incredible opportunity for all the would-be Plone hosting providers to come into this space and greatly contribute to the story of the platform for the one off site. ÂÂ
- In talking with N-TEN’s director of programs, I was told it was quite well received by attendees and compared favorably with the other sessions on Drupal & Joomla.
The Plone Blog: Being the "expert" for N-TEN
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