No Niin - Thank You All!

Plone Conference 2025 including PyCon Finland 2025 was a delightful event! Here's a quick summary and tips for the future.

What a Week!

Having Plone Conference 2025 and revived PyCon Finland 2025 in University of Jyväskylä on October 13-19 and seeing people come here from 30 different countries and enjoying their time was truly something special. Week was filled up with training, over 70 talks and a development sprint, but even more with meeting cool people. It was energising thanks to everyone being so nice (and getting free hugs when ever there was a chance).

Plone is a limitless open source content management system that we use here at JYU (and other places). Python is the most popular programming language out there (used also with Plone). It was exciting to see these two come together in one event. Open source software is made of people (like Soylent green, but in positive light) and people made this week special.

Keynotes and Talks - and Videos

I want to thank all keynote speakers, Timo Stollenwerk, Naomi Woods, Hanna Paananen and Patrik Lauha plus all other speakers who took the effort of coming here and sharing their insight.

Keynotes included:

• State of Plone - Plone 6.2 and Plone 7 by Timo Stollenwerk
• Human Perspectives in Cybersecurity: How Mental State and Social Interactions Can Affect Cybersecurity Posture by Naomi Woods and Hanna Paananen
• Muuttolintujen Kevät - Automatic Bird Sound Classifier by Patrik Lauha

Over 70 talks included insight to many topics, like:

Plone and Plone Community

• From Legacy Systems to a Scalable, Accessible Platform: A Case Study
• Designing with Plone 6: The Page Builder Experiment
• State of the Plone REST API
• Ajaxify Plone: Building a Single Page Application in Classic UI
• Seven: A Retrospective into the Future
• Would You Manage Nuclear Emergencies With Plone?
• Growing Plone: What Other Communities Do That Works
• Luna: A Next-Generation Volto & Plone Distribution for Building Consumer Websites (Website Builder)
• Spreading the Word of Plone in South Africa

Accessibility and Theming

• From Quick Wins to Advanced ARIA Patterns - Making React & Volto UI Components Accessible
• CSI: Contrast Standards Investigation - Entry Exam
• Make Theming Fun Again
• Theming Plone Seven

AI

• AI and the future of CMS: What it means for open source CMS and their users
• How can AI be used in Content Management Systems?
• AI-Driven Documentation Workflows for Plone & Volto
• Experiences with AI in Software Projects
• From .pot to Perfect: Standards-Driven AI that Gets Plone/Volto UI Translations Right

Python and Software Development

Friday 17th was dedicated to PyCon Finland. Here are some highlights from the talk selection:

• Living Software for a Living World
• Building RAG AI Applications with MariaDB Vector and Python
• Epic Evolution of Typing in Python: How We Get Here and Where Are We Going?
• I Wish You Were Fun
• Shiny for Python: Reactive Web Apps Made Simple
• Using Python with Satellites, Lessons from a Staff Engineer
• Why as Developer I Am Blind to Bugs
• DsPy the Declarative Programming in the Era of AI
• Scoring Big Air: Building a Scoring System for Red Bull King of the Air

And many, many more!

All presentation were recorded, so please subscribe Plone CMS in YouTube to stay up to date with video releases!

But Captain, It's Only Wednesday

Some curious highlights of the week include historical dancing while mimicking bird sounds, bold visitors skinny dipping into a freezing Lake Jyväsjärvi, photo competition with possible rap album cover images, and everything seemingly working despite this being the first time ever we organized something like that in digital services.

The conference and especially PyCon attracted new people, and we had 15 students from Jyväskylä to participate!

Kiitos, Kudos, Thank you!

I truly want to thank each and everone on our team for relentless effort to make it happen. I need to highlight Rita YU for being an endless source of positive energy and focus, Miro Paananen for effortlessly navigating and hosting social contacts and Asko Soukka for all organizing effort in every level, Jussi Talaskivi for MC duties and ad-hoc catering services. Jussi R., Erkka, Dmitri and Mikael, it was special to do this kind of thing together.

Three IT-student volunteers joined for this week an worked day and night to make it happen: Dhrubajotee Howlader, Iheme Tobechukwu and Wajahat Haider. 👏

Hugo van Kemenade and Daniel Vahla and others joined to revive PyCon Finland, and from what I hear you should look towards 2026 already. 🐍

Martin Peeters, T. Kim Nguyen and Mikel Larreategi along with Érico Andrei and Fred van Dijk and many others from Plone community were there to help and guide us all the way 🤝

Generous companies like iMio, Quaive and many others offered to sponsor, along with Python Software Foundation and EuroPython Society.

And last but not least:

Thank you visitors to coming all the way here! 🌍

To sum up: Thank you all! ❤️

We Want More!

Luckily, you can have more. Multiple Plone Sprints were announced for next year. Sprints and all other events can be found at Plone.org.

Subscribe Plone Newsletter (every two months) to stay up to date with Plone stuff.

PyCon events will be organized all over the world. Head up to https://pycon.org/ to look for the next one.

To read some other summary posts check out

• Maurits van Rees' blogging about talks he attended
• Juha-Matti Santala's recap of PyCon Finland 2025
• Érico Andrei's post about Plone Conference 2025

Oh, one more thing: Plone Conference 2026 was announced, and it will be held in Maastricht, Netherlands on September 21-28, 2026!

Can't wait to see you all there next year!

Cheers, Rikupekka