I became interested in Zope when I spotted a printed copy of The Zope Book in the Students’ Council premises of my faculty. I learned the basics of acquisition, object hierarcy and… DTML! Yes, that version of The Zope Book was so old it didn’t cover ZPT, and I build the whole website of my student’s association, Hypatia, using DTML and the ZMI.

Some months later I started contributing to the Alqua project, whose founders (Álvaro Tejero and Pablo Ruiz) were big fans of Zope and Plone and I helped migrating an plain-html site to a Plone one a year ago. That summer Álvaro attended to The Plone Conference 2007 at Naples, Italy and recommended two books to me: “Proffessional Plone Development”, by Martin Aspeli, and “Web Component Development with Zope 3″, by Philipp von Weiterhausen.

At first, these two books were too hard for me, specially PPD, and I left them in my shelves more than once thinking I would never understand the “extreme” complexity of Plone. I started learning Django and built my first real-world application: mini-litmus, a web-based QA tool for Mozilla-related products.

On July 2008 I started working for Zassh.com, a startup company, developing a sports-oriented social networking site built on Plone. There I realized that I weren’t a Plone newbie at all! Reading PPD and Philipp’s book turned out to be really helpful, and I hard-learned how to face real world Plone development issues, which were very different from what I expected. Plone is hard to tame!

Now I’ve become a documentation editor and I’m working to improve this well-known weak point of Plone. I’m e-meeting a lot of people from the community and looking forward to meet some of them personally at a sprint or conference.

Plone is a strong and mature CMS with features others have only dreamed with yet. New eggified products and modules are published every day in PyPI, exploring new concepts and design patterns. Paraphrasing Phillip J. Eby, “those who doesn’t study Plone are condemned to reinvent it”.

Happy ploning, community!