Finding Warmth in the Finnish Cold: Reflections on Plone Conference 2025

For the first time in a long while, I was unsure about attending a Plone Conference. It was a dream location, organized by people I love and respect, and packed with great talks and training sessions — but family health issues made me keep my plans open until the very last minute. In the end, I managed to go, and I’m truly glad I did.

Let's Go to Santa's Land

Let’s rewind to November 30, 2024, the very last day of Plone Conference 2024 in Brasília (which still deserves its long-overdue post here soon!).
Although I had known for some months that Jyväskylä would host the next edition, there’s always excitement about how the location will be announced.

That day, my wife and daughter were in the audience. When Rikupekka Oksanen took the stage during the lightning talks — pretending to introduce a completely different topic — I kept my eyes on my (then) 11-year-old daughter. I wanted to see her reaction when she realized that the next Plone Conference would take place in the land of reindeer and Santa Claus.

It paid off: as Rikupekka clicked through slides showing Finland’s beauty and made a few jokes, her eyes lit up and a huge smile appeared on her face.
At that exact moment, we — as a community — officially learned the location and dates of Plone Conference 2025.

Being Part of the Preparations

Since 2020, I’ve been involved in deploying and maintaining Plone Conference websites for each edition. After all the work invested in 2024.ploneconf.org, we decided to create an add-on — collective/tech-event — to reuse features and make it easier to set up future sites.

Even though I started collective/tech-event, in the months leading to the conference Asko Soukka became the driving force behind both the add-on and the Jyväskylä site. It was a perfect example of collaboration across the community.

My Annual Training Session

Before the conference, I updated my training session, Installing and Deploying Plone, making it more experimental than in previous editions.
Over the past year, I had tested several optimizations in how we create and maintain Plone projects, and this was the perfect opportunity to share them.

Together with my kitconcept colleague and dear friend Fred van Dijk, the session went smoother than expected — aside from a few typos and missing docs. By the end, around 15 participants had successfully:

• created a new Plone project
• added a few add-ons
• edited default content
• understood the CI/CD pipeline
• deployed their site to a freshly created DigitalOcean droplet

The most rewarding part was having experienced sysadmins and DevOps professionals in the room — people maintaining hundreds of Plone installations — giving valuable feedback and discussing how to balance CI/CD explanations, server setup with Ansible, and actual deployment time.

Highlights from Three Days of Talks

I won’t go into detail about every session — Maurits's coverage will handle that — but here are some talks that I was able to attend and stood out for me:

• State of Plone — Timo Stollenwerk
• The State and Direction of Plone Community IT — Fred van Dijk
• State of the Plone REST API — David Glick
• How We Deploy Cookieplone-Based Projects — Mikel Larreategi
• Plone on Kubernetes & Rancher2: Helm Charts and CI/CD at EEA — Valentina Bălan
• FHNW CMS Upgrade Project — Michael Perret & Adrian Schulz
• Epic Evolution of Typing in Python: How We Got Here and Where We’re Going — Cheuk Ting Ho
• A Case for Feminism in Open Source Development — Eric Bréhault

I could also list all the talks I missed — either due to schedule conflicts or because I was chatting in the corridor — but that would include most of the others! I’m now waiting for the recordings to appear on Plone’s YouTube channel, hopefully within the next couple of weeks.

What I Brought to the Table

Of course, I also had a few appearances during the week:

• Panel Discussion: Creating and Maintaining Plone Add-ons in 2026 — moderated by Sally Kleinfeldt, discussing the challenges of developing and maintaining Plone and Volto add-ons.
• Flying from One Plone Version to Another — The 2025 Migration Stack — with Jakob Kahl, sharing how we migrated two Plone 4.3 sites to Plone 6.1 using collective.transmute and collective.html2blocks.
• Create Your Next Conference Site with Plone — explaining collective/tech-event and why keeping it as a community-driven add-on matters.
• Announcement of @plone-collective/volto-image-editor — presented by my Simples Consultoria colleague Matheus Santana.

What the Conference Offered Me

A conference — any tech event, really — is about far more than the presentations. What makes Plone Conference special is the chance to reconnect, share stories, and learn from each other’s experiences. These relationships are what have kept our community thriving for over 25 years.

I had already met several friends earlier in the year — Victor Fernández de Alba, Piero Nicolli, Fred, Paul Roeland, Dante Álvarez, Philip Bauer, and Alessandro Pisa, among others — during sprints in Bucharest, Beethoven, or Salamina.
But it had been nearly a year since I last saw T. Kim Nguyen, Martin Peeters, Rikupekka Oksanen, Alexander Loechel, and Astrid Beyers in person, and even longer since meeting Sally Kleinfeldt, Eric Steele, Steve Pierce, Eric Bréhault, and Kim Paulissen.

As usual, the corridor talks were where ideas sparked and collaborations took shape. From those discussions, we drafted a plan to introduce type hints (Python typing) across the ~150 packages that make up a full Plone installation — a huge step forward for developer experience.

There were also topics I wanted to explore more deeply but couldn’t due to time constraints: the next iteration of the Plone UI (Seven), the Luna distribution — a beautiful, easy-to-use site builder — and everything related to AI. It’s impossible to be everywhere at once, but I’m happy with the choices I made.

Sprints

I only managed to attend the first day of the sprints, and didn’t commit a single line of code — but the discussions I joined were valuable. Topics included:

• Object storage support for Plone/Zope
• Deployment documentation improvements
• plone.org enhancements and the collective.casestudy add-on
• Typing support for Plone
• Refactoring cookieplone-templates
• The workflow-manager add-on

Some of these efforts are already moving quickly (like workflow-manager, plone-stubs, and plone.org improvements), while others — documentation and template refactoring — will take more time.
The Object Storage initiative will likely produce a proof of concept soon.

A Big Kiitos

This was one of the best-organized Plone Conferences I’ve ever attended — and that’s saying something, because they’re always excellent.
From the moment I checked in at the hotel (training instructors get free accommodation!) I could tell things would run smoothly.

Huge thanks to the amazing organizing team:

• Rikupekka Oksanen
• Asko Soukka
• Jussi Talaskivi
• Miro Paananen
• Jussi Rajala
• Erkka Heinilä
• Mikael Luukkonen
• Dmitri Buivolov
• Rita Yu
• Iheme Tobechukwu
• Dhrubajotee Howlader
• Wajahat Haider

Each one of you ROCK!

337 days later, let's meet in Maastricht

The next edition of the Plone Conference already had dates and a location announced. Our community will meet in Maastricht, The Netherlands, from September 21 to 27, 2026.

And, of course, I already started planning my journey!

Kiitos Jyväskylä, tot snel Maastricht!