May 2004—I'm on a flight to Las Vegas, Nevada, to announce at CA World 2004 the formation of the nonprofit Plone Foundation. Whilst on the plane, I'm also writing this foreword for the book—something I'm excited to see released as open source. Both are pieces in the bigger jigsaw puzzle of Plone, and I'm thrilled to see the holes in the puzzle being filled.

Over the past two weeks, the focus of the Plone community has moved from purely technical to much more unfamiliar territory: marketing. The Las Vegas trip will end with Computer Associates announcing that it's sponsoring the Plone Foundation. All of this will happen about three years after Alexander Limi and I first released what would become Plone. As Bill Hicks once said, "Who woulda thunk it?"

In May 2001, the startup company that I was the second employee at grew from 3 people to 160 people and then submerged under top heaviness, in both the development cycle (J2EE on every project) and the increasingly large management. I saw the handwriting on the wall. During the death throes, I practiced Python. I had been using Zope on our intranet and was fascinated by the software for several years (since International Python Conference 8). I thought Python was the only way I could accomplish the projects I was going to take on in my new life as a consultant.

As we were doing inventory during the day to sell off the company, at night I was writing Python code and lollygagging in the #zope channel. I met Alex in IRC (on #zope), and during our exchanges we decided that nothing in the world of Zope was near presentable to a customer. There was no polish. Alex—being in tune with usability and interface design—loathed the existing out-of-the-box Zope projects. I had a miserable time trying to sell developers on Zope because of the lack of pizzazz. We vowed we would make a user interface for Zope that would attract the world to the wonderful infrastructure it provided.

This is where I think Plone's pace and success was formed. Any sort of project requires momentum from the participants to keep rolling. Vidar Anderson created a mock-up of the proposed user interface, Alexander tweaked it and turned it into HTML, and I integrated the HTML into the code. This all occurred in about a 72-hour period. We went back and forth with the code for about two months. Different parts naturally fell into place. We had no master plan—it just consisted of fun and peer review. I think this productive/creative cycle of interaction between Alex and me provided enough feedback and stimuli to keep our involvement. When Alex disappeared for a month, I kept at it. When I dropped out of sight for a few weeks, he kept the project moving. We always kept the momentum of the project and understood that any long cessation would most likely spiral the project into abandonment or neglect.

We got our first contributor within three months of releasing some software. Now we have approximately 60 contributors. The mailing lists have so much traffic on them that it's impossible for me to keep up and do my regular job. We now have more than 35 translations of the user interface in different languages. We now have sprints (a term coined by Tres Seaver from Zope Corporation) all over the world where developers work on projects related to Plone and Zope, which moves Plone forward. We now have a foundation to ensure the longevity of the project. And, finally, we have corporate sponsorship, both large and small, to ensure that the foundation's vision can be realized.

The second Plone Conference will take place in September 2004 in Vienna, Austria. Wow.

Many people have helped paddle the Plone boat down the stream. But the momentum now has been transferred from developers to end users and business development. Only with documentation such as The Definitive Guide to Plone can the software be adopted on a larger scale. It isn't the existing audience of Plone we must serve—it's tomorrow's audience and newbies who must be more easily bootstrapped into being productive users and customizers of Plone. I think that with the current state of the project and supporting efforts such as this book, by the end of 2004 we'll be a unique project in the open-source landscape that focuses on business and user adoption and lets development fill in the cracks to ease the next generations of converts.

Alan Runyan
Plone Cofounder