Martin Aspeli wrote:
Dylan Jay-3 wrote:
Are other people finding is hard to find good plone
integrators/developers that need work?
I just wanted to open this up for dicussion this has been something that
has been troubling me for awhile.
Will plone survive if people picking up web development for the first
time prefer php, django, rails or .net to z2/z3?
Why do we care?
I care in the short term because its hard to expand a business without
developers. Clients face the same problem. If they are cluey their
criteria for picking a platform will included the availability of
development resources regardless of how cool the technology is.
but in the bigger picture open source survives by attracting new
developers. If there are no new z2/z3 developers then plone will die
right?
oh and new developers mean cool new sites or cool new addons, which
means publicity outside the community, which means more work for those
who integrate plone.
So how can we win this battle?
I think there are two ways to look at this:
1. You can't find good developers because no-one wants to do Plone work.
2. You can't find good developers because Plone is growing and everyone is
busy.
If you look at plone.net, there are over 250 companies that offer Plone
services. I don't think that's a sign of weakness.
Not weakness now but potentially in the future. I think there a lots of
companies using plone because they have settled on the best technology
available, ie Plone. It delivers. We all know that.
But my argument is that if all the fresh blood is doing into
ruby/django/drupal then they will be reinventing the wheel there instead
of discovering Plone and improving it.
Plone is never going to beat PHP for attracting college kids who want to put
together a quick dynamic website (not that this is all PHP is good for, of
course). That's not necessarily a bad thing, though. Most people who buy
Plone services also want to deal with professionals with some experience. I
think Plone has a place in the market for skills and investment, and it does
reasonably well there.
Professionals all started as collage kids. And many professionals are
hobbiests who want to play with technology in their spare time at first,
but that soon terns into a serious skill and that turns into
contributing to the community or offering their services to others.
These are the people we want to attract. These are the people who will
use google app engine and django to create some play apps. Or use drupal
and start telling everyone who extensible and powerful it is. and then
convince their corporate IT to use drupal for their intranet.
For these reasons I think we can't be too arrogant about what kind of
developers we attract and how many.
That's not to say we shouldn't do more to make Plone approachable to
developers and integrators, of course. The Plone Strategic Planning Summit
2008 was largely about how we do this.
Absolutely.
I noticed in the summit summary some words about hosting. I think this
is pretty important for attracting developers and we can do more in that
area. I don't think any action items got created for this.
I was thinking about how easy we could make plone deployment.
What is it people want to know? How easy is it going to be and how cheap
is it. With VPS prices coming down you can host a few plone sites for
$20 a month.
You just have to
- learn some unix admin.
- and find a VPS hoster.
- work out how much memory you need
- and setup a buildout on your machine
- and put your code in svn
- and deploy it to the server
- and then buildout on the server and then run.
Buildout is awsesome and that is so much less than it used to be. but
can we do more?
Can we make google app engine experience that will work on an ecosystem
of VPS hosters?
We need a server builder.
Download an installer. It runs the buildout builder and then the server
builder. Pick from a list of supported Ihosting companies. Hit "go" and
you have a complete development environment and deployment environment
all setup for you.
Just an idea.
Dylan.
_______________________________________________
Product-Developers mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.plone.org/mailman/listinfo/product-developers
