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Where content meets technology

Jul 08, 2006

Google Hires Plone Founder

Alexander Limi, co-founder of project and Plone and the main person behind the Plone user interface, recently announced that he has accepted a job offer at Google where he will join their user interface design team. When I first heard this news, I was concerned about the version 3.0 release which is designated as a UI focused release and which Limi has a central role. I am somewhat comforted in knowing that Limi will actually have more time to work on this effort than he currently does thanks to Google's generous one day a week policy. Google already supports many open source projects through its Summer of Code program

What about Limi's company Plone Solutions? Limi will remain on the board and remain active on projects that Plone Solutions is involved with (most notably LinguaPlone.)

I can see why Google recruited Alexander Limi. Both Limi and the Google design teams appear to share the same design values of simplicity and cleanness. Limi is famous for taking out more code than he puts in to keep the UI from becoming clunky, uncluttered, and non-compliant with accessibility standards (Plone is one of the most accessibility compliant CMS available. So much so that many government organizations use Plone to ensure their compliance). Also, Plone's focus on accessiblity has a side effect of making the generated HTML particularly usable by search engine crawlers.

So, I wish Alexander good luck on the new job and I am sure that the Plone community will keep him honest on his promise to stay involved.