GSoC - Plone Comments Posted on June 02, 2007 by Dave Fowler

A few posts ago I talked about our exploration into different frameworks and how we were going to give them all a fair and balanced analysis. Well, I lied. My apologies to any web curious developers out there who I may have disappointed. About 4 months ago I ran into Zope/Plone (yes, very late to the game) and thought it was pretty much the coolest thing out there. Amazed that I hadn't heard of it before I thought it was something new, but no, its been out for a surprisingly long time and is used by a ton of sites including NASA and the CIA.

Anyway, I applied for a Google Summer of Code (GSoC) grant. For those of you who don't know what it is, Google is just such an awesome company that they sponsor, with real money, students to work on open source projects. One of the projects they sponsor was Plone who just so happen to need an improved commenting infrastructure. I'm happy to say I got the opportunity and am now working with mentor Wichert Akkerman. There seems to be a great interest/need in the community for the improvement. Jon Stahl was nice enough to blog about his ideas and advice on Improving Plone Comments. I look forward to making a good product.

So I guess that once we finally decided what our startup was going to do, I was already pretty bias toward what programing language and web framework I wanted to use :). It will be great to work as part of the Plone community while using it for our startup. The GSoC will also provide us with a little spending cash for the summer! So far we've just been climbing the steep learning curve of Zope/Plone and get more and more impressed with its current functionality. One day, no doubt, I'll curse it for poor scalability or difficulty in expansion, but for building a prototype of a complicated web app there's nothing else like it.

Dave