"Romper, bomper, stomper, boo. Tell me, tell me, tell me do. Magic mirror, tell me today. Did all my friends have fun at play? hmm, I see Andy and Alex and Alan and Rob and Joel and Paul and Tuba and Jonah"

Well you get the picture, I'd be there all day with that empty mirror frame pressed to my face. With 350 attendees from all over the world, the Plone Conference 2006 (my first one) was an amazing success. Kudos to Jon Stahl and his team at One Northwest.

If you are still shaking your head at the reference at the beginning of this post. It's from Romper Room, a show for preschoolers way back when. Us old people can't help but remember. I always wished Miss MaryAnne would call my name.

I'm not going to tell you which one is me. I'll let you think it's the good looking blonde babe most of the Plone boys were drooling over (I dare you to take out a magnifying glass and see if you can find her).

The conference was phenomenal. As an invited speaker I had the added pleasure of sharing my Plone love with others. Yes, I love my man, I love my children, I love my mother.. but I also love Plone. Even more so now that I spent every waking moment at the conference inhaling it's essence. Does Plone have a smell? Sure, it smells like community.

Seriously, it was hard to chose which sessions to attend. My session "Vive Le Plogs" was not heavily attended as I ran opposite of the very popular, very well respected Martin Aspelli and his "b-org: creating content types the Plone 2.5 way". I heard it was great.

So how was my session? I've done some conference sessions in the past, in another life. Not at a primarily technical conference. I think it went really well and although I started with some rather inconsequential info (for this crowd anyway) when I started showing my use cases for blogging, the room lit up. Talk about inspiring. I'm definitely going to do this again.

I'm still riding high from a very motivational conference. The highlight was Joel Burton's pre-conference skinning course I attended and walked away from with a new found respect for the power of Plone skins! I guess that's not fair as Joel's session wasn't part of the conference per se, but I'm getting tired of typing and I plan on adding more posts throughout the week about my experience at PloneConf 2006.

Once again, Jon Stahl and team.. AWESOME!