Grace StahreGraduating from Spaghetti to Sushi: Plone for PHPers (2006)

Sean Kelly's talk from Plone Conference 2006.

Has PHP failed you? Has sieve-like security and the tangled skein of HTML, SQL, and business logic (all within the same file) led to routine defacements, XSS attacks, and management screaming for solutions yesterday? In other words, are you ready to leave spaghetti behind and enjoy the order and elegance of sushi? Find joy in dynamic content-driven websites that embrace polymorphic ideologies, robust security, and effortless extensibility with agile languages and modern object databases. Find Plone.

Sean Kelly is a NASA consultant, screencasting superstar, and master bartender who'll tickle your brain (and your funny-bone) in a rapid-fire talk that'll leave you thirsty for more knowledge, if not a martini.


This talk was originally presented at Plone Conference 2006 in Seattle, WA.

Download supporting presentation materials for (most) conference talks.

This item is part of the collection: Open Source Movies

Director: Grace Stahre
Producer: The Plone Community
Production Company: Versant Media
Audio/Visual: sound, color
Language: English
Keywords: plone; open-source; plone conference; software; content management systems; sean kelly; php

Creative Commons license: Attribution-ShareAlike

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Reviewer: nateklaiber - - January 15, 2007
Subject: Presenter lacks intelligence.

I wouldn't waste your time watching this video, even if you are a plone evangelist. You simply can't give a presentation about two things if you don't know about both things. It is clear he doesn't know advanced PHP - which I think is rather pathetic.

If you want a bland site that looks like every other plone powered site, watch this video. If you want to have an evangelist preach of XHTML, yet have their own pages fail against W3C validation, then use plone. If you want to deal with a data layer that is a pain to access, then use plone. If you want a resource hog, then use plone. If you want everyone to edit your professional website with Microsoft Word, then use plone.

The presenter, for being a 'computer scientist', should at least learn a little bit more before giving a presentation. He lost credibility right from the beginning - and the rest of the presentation just got worse.

Again, just because he doesn't know how to program PHP properly (and just take low jabs at older constructs), doesn't mean that PHP is not a scalable language.

Every language has the potential to be abused. We used plone, and found it was worthless for usability because EVERYTHING looked the same, and our users couldnt discern how to use the admin panel or navigate the site. Thinking that a CMS is a magic solution is ridiculous. Just because everyone CAN type something into word, doesn't mean they can make an effective and useful website - therefore making usability very poor, because people who have NO clue about web usability are now 'publishers' on the web.

I've used both, and trying to just stretch plone to be unique and fit our content structure was horrible. I don't buy that a CMS will fit all needs, and I sure as heck don't want to deal with all of the overhead of Plone, just to create something simple.

I have respect for quality plone developers, but this guy is lacking ANY credibility. Do yourself a favor and watch the other videos where you can actually learn something new.