At the heart of the Plone community: Beethoven and Buschenshank sprint recap
I have participated in the Beethoven Sprint in Bonn and the Buschenschank Sprint in Spielfeld. Being present at the development sessions (or sprints ) and meeting face to face gives us the opportunity to give our perspective, which can condition the future of the project when decisions are made.
But being part of the community is not just about attending conferences, it's also about staying up to date with daily developments. In our case, we try to do just that: by following the movements on GitHub , constantly suggesting improvements and contributing to Volton , publishing translations , or promoting sponsorships on the plone.org site.
Future direction: frontend and backend diversity
Beyond the pure dichotomy between Volto and Classic that has emerged in Plone in recent years, the debate is expanding to the diversity of frontend and backend architectures. It is increasingly clear in the community that "Plone" refers to the entire concept, and from there, we can have different "flavors" or combinations depending on the technology stack used (Classic + Python backend, Volto + Python backend, Aurora + Python backend...).
Some believe that Classic's development slows down Volta's, but the key is to innovate in this rich ecosystem of different frontends and backends, revealing the strength and importance of this ecosystem's diversification.
2 main trends observed in the workshops
In addition to architectural discussions, the workshop left us with interesting reflections on the daily lives of developers:
- The dominance of JavaScript and TypeScript: Whether it's React or Svelte, all developers master one of these technologies, whether it's to make Volton blocks or improve Classic interfaces.
- Normalization of Artificial Intelligence: The use of AI is completely generalized. People use it to write code without any "shame". Many use Claude Code, Codex (ChatGPT) or OpenCode, integrated into the editor itself. Some have great workflows built in (Gemini Pro for thinking, Opus for deep analysis, Sonnet for quick work...).
Work done in sprints
In two sprints, I worked on the following areas:
- Unifying the cookieplone ecosystem: bringing the various existing templates into one and modernizing everything: improving the cookieplone, cookieplone-templates, tui-forms and mxdev libraries.
- Working on updating Plone demos to version 6.2
- Modernizing Mosaic product documentation
- Translations from the Polyglot project, brought to Volto and Slate
- Making changes to Buildout to use projects without setup.py files as development eggs.
- Updating collective.richdescription
- participating in a community recognition project
- ... and participating in many other discussions and exchanges of opinions!
The next stop will be at the end of September 2026, in Maastricht (Netherlands) , at the 2026 conference organized by our friends Syslab. We will try to be there!
You can find more photos from these sprints on the Plone Foundation's Flickr account:
Thank you to the entire Kitconcept team and especially Jakob and Timo for organizing the Beethoven Sprint, and also to Johaness for inviting him to the Buschenschank sprint and for all the organization there!
