what the h*** is Plone? Why are they having a conference? Is this a big change from previous conferences? Are they important? Do they do something the average Apple user should be aware of/concerned about?

Journalism 101, guys. Who, What, Where, When and WHY it's RELEVANT.

http://plone.org/

Plone is an open source CMS based on Zope and Python. You can download plone from plone.org or zope.org for free. For that matter you can download Zope from from either as well. What does it matter to Mac users? Both Plone and Zope are open source like FreeBSD, the foundation for Mac OS X. Were it not for the the people at Zope and Plone and everyone else who contributes to open source software we would all be stuck using MS's lousy proprietary insecure OS. I work for a very large company that uses Zope's software and I'm a devout Mac user as well. The Mac community should realize that not only is Linux a threat to MS because it is much more stable and free and open source, but also that OS X would not exist without FreeBSD and the open source community. Prior to release of OS X I was totally ready to buy a PC and install Red Hat Linux because OS 9 and earlier were just as unstable and buggy as windoze despite the better interface. OS X has given Apple a quantum leap ahead from wintendo thanks to the hard work of open source programmers everywhere.

... for the info. The Plone website is too cluttered to really quickly find clear info like what you provided. Much obliged.

I still say it would not have killed MacNN to include ONE LINE explaining briefly a) what Plone is and b) if it's odd or good or unusual that 30% of Plone conference attendees are on Macs. I have nothing to compare it to, do I?

From where I sat, it looked like the MAJORITY of the laptops were Mac. I always assumed the core developers used PCs with Linux, so I was quite pleasantly surprised. Pictures of the conference are starting to be posted
http://plone.org/events/conferences/1/conference_images/
Only one image so far shows some of the Mac laptops, but I am sure more are on the way. Over-all I think the conference was a success. Only about 40-50 attendees were expected, about 150 showed up!
Hope to see you there next year, (location still to be determined.)

From where I sat, it looked like the MAJORITY of the laptops were Mac. I always assumed the core developers used PCs with Linux, so I was quite pleasantly surprised. Pictures of the conference are starting to be posted
http://plone.org/events/conferences/1/conference_images/
Only one image so far shows some of the Mac laptops, but I am sure more are on the way. Over-all I think the conference was a success. Only about 40-50 attendees were expected, about 150 showed up!
Hope to see you there next year, (location still to be determined.)