plonewars.com

Quite a number of people will read Steve Pavlina’s blog (or they know
it exists and simply hate it). He has a new interesting post about
how your mind really
works
. The core take-away is that, in order to grow in intelligence, your
mind needs fodder: new input, preferrably different from what you’ve
already fed your mind with. That’s the basis for the rest of your
mind’s capabilities. Quote: Push yourself to take on new input, the
likes of which you’ve never previously experienced, and you will
become smarter.

That triggered something in my mind regarding the upcoming plone 3.0
release. Reactions to every major release range from “eeeek, changes!”
to “great new functionality”. I’d like to make a few loose comments to
let you look at the fact of a new plone release from a different
angle.

• The constant evolving of plone gives you ever more new
  experiences. If you’re doing frequent plone development, that
  is. And if you do it frequent enough to use a reasonable proportion
  of those changes. Well, great. Those experiences cost you
  learning time and pay you back with more input for your mind. Your
  programming mind is exposed to different ways of doing things,
  allowing it to grow and to get better at solving customer
  problems. More experience at different things means more stuff for
  your mind to work with.
• Plone evolves to something great. Every release is a bit cleaner, a
  bit better organised, a bit more maintainable, a bit more
  adaptable. For someone new to plone, the amount of new stuff will be
  about the same as when they would have started with 2.1 or so. Or
  1.0. Only the new version ought to make more sense.
• Not everybody will be able to keep up with all the
  changes. Partially no problem, there’s enough backward-compatibility
  in plone to make sure most add-on products work on two or three
  major releases at the same time. Partially a huge problem. You might
  have more new experiences than you’re comfortable with or more than
  you can handle. Plone’s add-on story can help greatly here. Limit
  the amount of customisations you do to the amount you can re-learn
  from time to time. And use add-ons for the rest. Good add-ons will
  span multiple major releases. (I do think almost no-one can handle
  all the newest zope3 + plone 3.0 + grok + whatever stuff at the
  same time, so everybody has to watch out for this to a certain
  degree.)
• More diverse experiences? Don’t limit yourself to just plone. Also
  brush up your lisp skills for some new emacs library. Or build a
  simple website with Django or Rails. Delve into openplans’
  “deliverance” and get into xslt. All “notes to myself”, btw

All this verbosity is meant to give a new twist to the fact that
there’ll be a new plone release. Look at it from a different angle: a
new experience that feeds your mind new raw data