I attended my first Atlanta Python user group’s meeting (PyAtl) this month (see the meeting announcement). I have a regular conflict on Thursday evenings (soccer:), but made this one to give a talk on Plone. Our local Atlanta Plone users group has merged with PyAtl and serves as a Special Interest Group now.
Brandon Rhodes opened the session with a discussion of search trends, using Google Trends, and left us with a question: 
why isn’t Python and Plone going up in the trend lines? That framed my talk nicely, as I got to share my enthusiasm for Plone, which I believe if more people knew about certainly would be trending up! I gave a talk to help those there learn more about Plone, an intro and answering some questions about why people choose Plone. To my surprise, several people there had prior Plone experience, but not recent work. So it was like re-chosing Plone…they recalled things like dtml and lots of through-the-web editing and other pain, so I think I played the role of dusting off the memories and filling in some details about where Plone has gotten to now. In particular, the fact that it is easy to install, uses extensive Zope 3 and the community has adopted best practices in development widely, that there is lots of documentation (and books), and that the community rocks!
I didn’t do any demos or code stuff, just introducing why we should care about Plone…hopefully that will be the subject of our future contributions at PyAtl meetings!
The presentation videos are now up on the PyAtl site, though the sound is quite low. I will be posting my slides as soon as I get a chance to clean them up a bit…but they were based heavily on Jon Stahl’s slides, the World Plone Day slides, and bits and pieces from Roberto Allende and Nate Aune’s presentations too 
. See Plone Evangelist hq for more of those.
Also, as part of our merger to into PyAtl, note that we now have domains atlantaplone.com and atlantaplone.net working! (please note that the .org address has been lost to domain hell).
My first meeting certainly was fun (and I thoroughly enjoyed Steve Holden’s talk on Python community…more on that in a later post), so I hope to be back soon!
