Session Details
Full descriptions of Plone Conference 2006 sessions. We'll be posting the schedule in late August after all talks are selected.
New to Plone Track
Graduating from Spaghetti to Sushi: Plone for PHPers -- Sean Kelly
Has PHP failed you? Has sieve-like security and the tangled skein of HTML, SQL, and business logic (all within the same file) led to routine defacements, XSS attacks, and management screaming for solutions yesterday? In other words, are you ready to leave spaghetti behind and enjoy the order and elegance of sushi? Find joy in dynamic content-driven websites that embrace polymorphic ideologies, robust security, and effortless extensibility with agile languages and modern object databases. Find Plone.
About the Speaker: Sean Kelly is a NASA consultant, screencasting superstar, and master bartender who'll tickle your brain (and your funny-bone) in a rapid-fire talk that'll leave you thirsty for more knowledge, if not a martini.
Why Plone ? - Confessions of an NGO -- Andrew Hatton, Oxfam GB
A look at how Oxfam GB came to chose Plone as its content management system. We will look at:
- Oxfam GB's overall vision for the project
- Comparing Plone to the competition
- Behind the scenes of Oxfam evaluation process
- The road to implementation
- Contributions Oxfam made to Plone along the way
About the Speaker: Andrew Hatton is IT Manager at Oxfam GB. Andrew has worked for Oxfam for 5 years, and has been involved in a number of large IT infrastructure projects. Andrew was of the original team involved in selecting Plone for Oxfam's CMS, and remains involved in its continuing development.
Case study panels
These sessions will showcase successful Plone projects across a variety of sectors.
- Plone and nonprofits - facilitated by Andrew Hatton, Oxfam GB
- Plone and government organizations - facilitated by Richard Amerman, 7TechNW
- Plone and scientific organizations - facilitated by Roché Compaan, Upfront Systems
- Plone and education -- facilitated by Chris Calloway, University of North Carolina
- Plone and large enterprises -- facilitated by Munwar Shariff, CIGNEX
Integrators & Consultants Track
High Performance Plone: Caching -- Joel Burton
Plone's rich interface and deep customization provide excellent features for modern web sites. However, without planning and tuning, Plone sites can generate every part of every page, every time, causing slowness. There are excellent built-in features for speeding Plone sites up tremendously, however, with little or no loss of freshness or customization.
This tutorial covers techniques for deploying Plone for performance, optimizing your site with CacheFu, using Zope's cache-in-memory features, and tips and techniques for tying it all together. In this class, you'll learn the tips and tricks professionals use to make their sites 20x, 30x, and even 100x faster than standard out-of-the-box Plone.
About the Speaker: Joel Burton is a content management and knowledge management consultant and trainer, and has been working with Plone full-time since 2002. He serves on the Board of Directors of the Plone Foundation, has volunteered for various community projects, and offers "Plone Bootcamps" and other hands-on user- and developer training through http://plonebootcamps.com.
Improving Plone's Add-on Products Story -- Martin Aspeli
Plone is bigger than just the core software. Add-on products, found in the "Products" section of Plone.org ( http://plone.org/products), play a vital part in most real-world implementations of Plone. However, users are sometimes frustrated by the difficulties in locating and choosing between add-on products, and by the variations in quality and maturity among the hundreds of products in the Collective.
This session will be a discussion between the people behind Plone's "Products" section, core and add-on product developers and - most importantly - you, the audience, on how we can improve Plone's add-on products story, and make it easier for new users to locate and evaluate existing add-on Products.
Organised by: Martin Aspeli, a Plone core developer, third-party products contributor and author of documentation such as "RichDocument: Creating content types the Plone 2.1 way" and "Testing in Plone".
Other participants to be confirmed.
Plone Mashups: Connecting with Web 2.0 - Brian Gershon, RagingWeb
Python programs can easily pull information from anywhere. "Anywhere" these days often refers to mashing up data from a variety of interesting
Web 2.0 services. In recent Plone projects we've used Python and AJAX to integrate maps from Google, blog feeds from Technorati, images from Flickr - using the power of tagging inside and outside of Plone. This session will give you some brief background on Web 2.0, and samples of how you could use these technologies in your own Plone sites.
About the Speaker: Brian Gershon is a developer in Seattle building Plone sites for progressive businesses and non-profit organizations.
Plone Developers Track
Developing Plone Products Using Zope 3 Technologies - An Introduction -- Rocky Burt, ServerZen
Plone developers are already productive and innovative. But the new Zope 3 component architecture, which is part of Plone 2.5 and above, makes it even easier and faster to build powerful add-on Products that are both manageable and reusable.
This in-depth tutorial, suitable for folks who have some experience building add-on Products for Plone but are not yet comfortable with Zope 3, will demonstrate how you can taking an existing Plone Product and refactor it to use Zope 3 technology and techniques.
About the Speaker: Rocky Burt is an experienced Java/J2EE developer who now focuses on Plone development and the Zope 3 component architecture. Since making the leap to Plone, he has become a Plone framework team member, a core Plone developer, and Zope 3 enthusiast.