Holding focused meetings, also known as "sprints," over several days to develop, test and document software is proving very helpful to the open-source Plone community in quickly adding more functionality to its content management software.

The project was started in 2000 by Alan Runyan and Alexander Limi, who now works at Google in the user experience team, and it has proven popular particularly because the software supports more than 50 languages. Plone helps users manage documents, files and images through a Web interface and also lets them publish that content to the Internet or to an intranet.

The latest Plone sprint is in full swing at the Boston offices of the daily newspaper The Christian Science Monitor, attracting more than 20 attendees, including one apiece from Germany and Finland, and seven remote participants based in Australia, Germany, Italy, Switzerland and the United States. The aim by close of play Sunday is to have produced release 1.0 final versions of Plone4Artists Audio and Calendar software and a beta version of the Video component. Work will center on improving how the Plone content management software handles audio and video files and images.

In putting together a sprint, one of the hardest things is to prioritize what's achievable over the three or five days that the event will last, according to Nate Aune, one of the leaders and organizers of the Boston sprint. You need to take into account the skill levels of the participants and the features both they and the community as a whole are clamoring for.

There have been about 30 Plone sprints since the first such event took place in Berne, Switzerland in February 2003. Tres Seaver, a senior software developer, began to use sprints in 2002 as a way to speed up the development of Zope 3, an open-source Web application framework that's written in the Python programming language.

The idea is to have small groups of developers, say two to three individuals in each group, working on specific issues over several days. Plone is built using Zope and so it was natural for the community to also embrace the concept of sprints. Plone sprints aren't limited to coders though, Aune said. Participants with other skills—for instance, writing documentation and software testing—are also welcome.

As the event begins, sprinters tend to naturally gravitate into small groups, and event organizers have to help that process only a little by doing a spot of matchmaking, Aune said—for instance, encouraging people with the same interests, such as calendaring, to sit next to each other and start talking.