2001 - Jazkarta

While living in New York City in 2001, musician and web architect, Nate Aune developed Jazkarta, a website for NYC jazz musicians and fans. The purpose of the site is to provide musicians with a place to showcase their music and network with other musicians.

2003 - Plone

In 2003, Nate discovered Plone and saw it as an excellent foundation on which to build an out-of-the-box website solution for artist communities. The rich diversity of products and a healthy and friendly developer community were signs that Plone was a good choice.

October: The idea (as yet unnamed) is presented as a 5 minute lightning talk at the first Plone Conference in New Orleans.

Photo: Plonistas hanging out in the French Quarter

2004 - Plone4Artists

Initially thinking of using Plone solely for musician communities, Nate soon realized that the model could just as well include all types of artist communities (filmmakers, writers, painters, actors, poets, etc.).

And so Plone4Artists was born as a project to develop a general purpose solution for artist communities which can be totally customized to each community's special needs.

February: the project gathers some momentum as Nate discusses the ideas with fellow developers at the Snow Sprint in Austria.

June: at the annual EuroPython conference in Gothenburg, Sweden, Nate gives another lightning talk at the Zope track.

2005

In 2005, Plone4Artists gains more awareness through Nate's talks at various conferences and symposiums.

June: Nate gives the first official talk about Plone4Artists at EuroPython 2005 in Gothenburg, Sweden.

July: Nate gives a talk about building ArtistSite using ArchGenXML / UML at the Plone Symposium 2005 in New Orleans, LA

September: Nate gives a talk about Building an Artist Community website with ArchGenXML / Poseidon at the annual Plone Conference in Vienna, Austria.

Plone4Artists also gains more interest among the Plone developer community through two sprints.

September: the Multimedia sprint which took place immediately following the Plone conference in Vienna, Austria, brought together developers from 20 nations (including India, Australia, South Africa and Brazil).

December: The Calendaring sprint in San Francisco, CA was co-organized by Burning Man and Jazkarta.

2006

Two events which pushed the Plone multimedia efforts forward were the Snow Sprint and the Big Apple Sprint. Evangelizing Plone as a platform for podcasting, Nate gives a presentation "Multimedia and Podcasting with Plone" at the Plone Symposium and Plone Conference.

Nate also reached out to the non-Plone hacker communities in Boston and San Francisco through his participation in Barcamp and Podcamp.

February: Together with Lovely Systems, Nate co-organized the Snow Sprint which brought together 35 sprints from 12 countries. Much work was done on the multimedia components including PloneTramline, Transcoding, Flash media player and more.

March: Nate gives a talk Multimedia and Podcasting with Plone at the Plone Symposium in New Orleans.

May: Nate organizes a session Microformats and Music at the BarCamp San Francisco.

June: Nate organizes a session "How Technology is Changing the Music Industry" at BarCamp Boston to discuss tools for building online artist communities.

July: Nate organizes a multimedia team at the Big Apple Sprint to work on better video support and large file handling.

September: Nate organizes a session "Podcasting with Plone" at the first ever Podcamp Boston.

October: Nate gives a 45 min talk about Multimedia and Podcasting with Plone at the Plone Conference in Seattle, WA.

Nate organizes a multimedia team at the Seattle Sprint.

2007

Jan-Feb: Nate organizes multimedia team at the Snow Sprint in Sibratsgfäll, Austria

March: Nate organizes a multimedia team at the Sorrento Sprint, Sorrento, Italy

May: Nate gives a talk at LinuxTag in Berlin, Managing multimedia content and podcasts with Plone

June: Nate gives a talk at DZUG Conference in Potsdam on Managing Multimedia Content and podcasts with Plone.

Nate organizes a multimedia team at the PIKTipi sprint in Potsdam, Germany.

July: Nate and Rocky organize the Plone4Artists / multimedia sprint in Boston. See the sprint planning page.

August: Nate gives a talk at PyConBrasil about Plone.tv, the first public website to showcase the audio/video capabilities of Plone4Artists. Slides and Video

October: Nate presents Multimedia and Podcasting with Plone at the Plone Conference 2007 and organizes the multimedia team at the post-conf sprint in Naples, Italy.

Nate presents Plone.tv at Podcamp Boston.

Plone.tv launches!

November: Nate gives a talk at the Content Management Professions Summit in Boston, Podcasting and Publishing Multimedia Content with a Web CMS: Exploring the Multimedia Features of Plone.
See the slides.

Plone4Artists 1.0 is released!

Future

Have a look at the roadmap to see what we are planning for future Plone4Artists developments.