As i've been doing a few projects with Drupal recently I've set up a google group for people in the Bristol (UK) and surrounding area:-

http://groups.google.com/group/bristol-drupal
For anyone wondering if this means i'm deserting Plone, the answer is no - i'm also working on a couple of Plone projects too! I will post an article when I get time outlining my experiences of both - comparing and contrasting the development.

I recently bought a new compact camera - a tiny casio elixim Z1050. Historically I have always been disappointed with the performance of compact digital cameras, mainly because of shutter lag. This one is much better, with only a tiny lag at 10 megapixels. Although one day i'd like to get a digital SLR, for now I just wanted a compact to carry with me to snap pictures I can use for web sites, and also to take a few skateboarding pictures. One feature that has proven to be excellent for the latter is the high-speed continuous mode with takes several shots a second at 2 megapixels, allowing me to grab a sequence (like below, or just take the best frame from several, to get the best action shot.)


Best frame - original pic is 2 megapixels - fine for snapshot prints and web stuff:-

Even though I seem to have slipped off planet plone recently (design or accident? - must find out!), i'm fascinated by the current debate about Through The Web (TTW) support in Plone. I must admit I have noticed a general "TTW is bad" vibe from hardcore Plone developers - in fact i've heard it said outright on many occasions. As a Plone integrator/ general web developer I can see the pros and cons of TTW, but i've certainly seen it as a selling point of Plone - people commissioning a CMS, even for a large corporate site or intranet often get excited at the possibilities of being able to make customisations and additions themselves without having to get expensive developers in to make changes - and why shouldn't they? I've also been a position where i've taken on a few customisations of Plone sites where the most of the site lives in the custom skin layer, edited TTW and it is a great way to make minor amends on the fly, and something that i've always liked about plone, even though I am fluent with file system development.

Sadly I couldn't make it to Plone Conference this year, but I have just got off MSN from Matt at Netsight, and he said that there are no fewer than eight thirteen Plone people form Bristol, UK attending - representing Netsight, Team Rubber and IRLT. Can any other cities in the UK claim that many Plonistas?

I've just made a breakthrough in my perception of Zope and its object database. Despite the fact I have been working with Plone for over three years i've always struggled to shift my way of thinking away from relational databases and SQL queries, due to my previous experience of building sites and applications mainly with asp (classic) and php, hooked up to a relational database.
So what caused my Eureka moment? A combination of:-

a. Not developing with plone for a while

Since going it alone I have been doing an eclectic mix of work for different agencies and companies, who all have their own pet technologies and ways of working (so far I have slotted straight into them all with a minimum of fuss- Jack-of-all-trades at your service! Except Perl. I had to turn that one down).

b. Doing a bit of old school Zope

From the moment I started with plone, when I haven't been skinning/ templating, I have worked almost entirely with Archetypes. Archetypes generates forms for you and all the other "magic" - some lovely helpful magic, some dark voodoo that shouldn't be spoken aloud in front of non-programmers (like me). This means that with Zope I never learned how to do a typical build a form that posts to script, script writes to database, script pulls out of database and renders it back in the page/form routine, which is usually the first thing I would learn with any other web technology/scripting language.

c. Starting to think in objects

Once again, this had more to do with not working with zope for a while. Before zope I only had a basic understanding of objects and only used them where I was forced to because I was working with someone elses code. I would encapsulate functionality by sticking a load of php/asp functions in an include file with a meaningful name, but I never took the step of wrapping them up in a class and treating the piece of functionality as an object. Something must have sunken in during my Zope years, because now I find it difficult to not think of something as an object.

So, i'm rambling - what exactly was my moment of clarity? It was simply adding a few extra fields (wait - properties) to portal_memberdata and personalize_form in Plone. I went off searching for the python script that would take the data out of the database and pump it into an object for me to use again in a page template - but of course, being stored in the ZODB, it already was an object. Z.O.D.B. Zope Object DataBase - geddit?

So in summary, I think anyone new to plone development could do with learning things the "old" way before they move onto developing with Archetypes - purely for the sake of demystifying the ZODB, especially if like me you come from a php/asp background and have trouble understanding why you would use an object database rather than a relational database.

Next stop Zope 3 - I've read several reports about the large amount of boiler plate code needed to create something fairly simple with Zope 3, and a few solutions to speed up the process, but I will definitely make sure to understand how it is done "manually" before attempting to move onto using any shortcuts this time.