The Sprint challenge:
Make the pope praise Plone on a balcony.
The Making of
Started as a joke in the Slack marketing channel,
as acsr on 8th Sept. 2026 [7:36 PM] I posted the punchline:
Sell a Ticket to the pope and let him tell on the balcony
Rikupekka let an AI create an image, and of course the AI missing a contemporary pope and the actual Conference design. Then Astrid puts up the challenge as a Sprint topic:
Make the Pope praise Plone on a balcony.
I took it literally!
Started during the Plone Conference 2026 Sprint this new terminal comedie automation is now available directly from my gitlab (not on PYPI yet):
See my After Sprint Wrapup - Wednesday 30. Sept. praiseplone in the Sprint doc
It is based on the cowsay idea and has tons of options
- featuring Dracula, a fictive Pope, Jesus and Guido (van Rossum)
- You can change gestures, eyes!
- Alter the brandname, the text in the banner, and of course the ballon text
- You can even add your own characters or Brand Logos as ASCII text.
Terminal command example (you need uv installed ):
uvx --from git+https://gitlab.evenios.org/plone-public/praiseplone.git praiseplone -c guido --gesture hands-up \
-B 'Plone Conference 2026' -B 'Marketings Fools Sprint Challenge accepted!' \
'I love Plone and like to express it using ASCII Art on a balcony!'
uv is an extremely fast Python package and project manager, written in Rust.docs.astral.sh
Make sure to read and understand the TODO section of the README in the repo! This will get more details coming soon but should be enough to get an idea.
Current state:
TODO (Creative Outlook Perspective)
- Extend to allow a second (or even third) character on the same balcony
at the same time and allow to create a chat between them. - Allow to script comic strip panels explaining a Plone Success Story or Case Study.
- use live update to animate the terminal output with
- animated gestures,
- eye state change (twinkle),
- turning heads,
- complete dialogs,
- Needs: Timing and dramatic design -> use Subtitle Formats for construction (allowing for translation)
- Add characters Ada & Zangemann
- Use the ASCII Art versions as animatics to create full featured hollywood
blockbusters with sundance as postproduction step
Later praiseplone can be easily integrated into cookieplone as an easteregg. We just need a hook to fire up the uvx command.
The ai generated image for reference:
Link to the original conversation source (not public):
https://plone.slack.com/archives/CTZNPGY3C/p1788889005403709