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by Carlos de la Guardia.
Original Post: Plone México continues to grow
Feed Title: I blog therefore I am
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We had a very successful Plone gathering tonight at the UNAM. Seven persons from the Plone World Day event joined us for this meeting, surpassing all expectations. Every one of the 20 seats on our small classroom was occupied.
The speaker for the night was Héctor Velarde, who gave a very detailed talk about his experience using Plone at the Mexican newspaper La Jornada. This is one of the most important newspapers in México, the voice of the political left.
La Jornada was the first Mexican newspaper to offer news from their print edition on the web in 1995 (actually, the first recognized communication medium of any kind in México to do that, be it a magazine, radio or TV station). However, until Héctor arrived there in 2004 to direct the web effort, they were happy just putting the contents of the print edition up daily, without any dynamic content or last minute news.
While Héctor was there, La Jornada began adding breaking news and became the first Mexican newspaper to offer RSS feeds for the news. Soon, he began looking for a CMS to help streamline the news production process. Someone recommended either Plone or some forgotten (by him) Perl solution.
It's obvious which one he chose, or I wouldn't be writing this. Thus his very small team of one system administrator, one developer and himself got some Plone training and started to work (disclaimer: I was the person who gave them that express training marathon at the end of 2005).
It wasn't an easy road and there were several false starts (the paper's resources were scarce and there was no Plone México group back then or really almost anybody who could help), but by the time the Mexican presidential elections came in 2006 he had learned enough to put up a very simple site focused on the elections and using just a few tried and true products. This approach worked well and in 2007 the paper set up a Plone site to publish all the news that came throughout the day.
The paper's traffic almost tripled in a couple of months after this site came online and they faced the usual performance problems that this causes, but by this time Héctor was more involved with the International Plone community and help was a lot easier to find.
At this point he was able to start contributing some code to the Plone community and released products like ATGoogleVideo, TagCloud, ATOdeoAudio and nitf4plone, his last work while at La Jornada. By this time, early 2008, both the sysadmin and the developer had left the paper and the pressure of working at the newspaper got to him, so he quit.
His story ended on a kind of sour note, since we learned that La Jornada is now on the process of substituting Plone for Drupal, because the new people in charge thinks Plone is too difficult to learn for developers and they already know PHP.
To look at the bright side, we are hopeful that the existence of our new Plone group can help interested parties in México to avoid the problems that early adopters usually face, or at the very least provide some company and advice for the inevitable bumps on the road that will come. I'd say we seem to have started with the right foot.
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