This Month in Plone - July 2010

 

Plone Symposium South America 2010 Issues Call for Proposals


Plone Cono Sur invites you to attend and show your Plone skills at the second edition of the Plone Symposium South America to be held in Cordoba, Argentina.

Plone Symposium South America is a regional event created to gather Plone users from Government, Education, NGO and Private Sector. We  also strengthen the Plone Community in South America, socially and technically, through training and sprints. Promote Plone locally through the half-day Success Stories session.

Cordoba is located near the geographical center of Argentina, about 700 km (435 mi) northwest of Buenos Aires. Cordoba is the second largest city in Argentina, and has all the features of a metropolitan city. The city is 5 centuries old, it has lovely pedestrian streets, huge shopping centers, and many historical places, some of them considered World Heritage by UNESCO. The city is surrounded by valleys, formed up by three main mountain groups. It is known for the colonial buildings in the center as well as for the beautiful hills in the surroundings. The city is called La Docta because of the many universities and scientific institutes. Around 200.000 people study here, which makes the city one of those with the youngest and liveliest appearance in South America.

You can find out more about this great event at http://plonesymposium.com.ar


Plone Chosen as New Publishing Environment for MIT's OpenCourseWare (OWC)


MIT OpenCourseWare ( http://ocw.mit.edu/ ) is a web-based publication of virtually all course content from the Massachusetts Insitute of Technology (MIT). It is a resource that is used by students, teachers and average people around the world via the web, giving average citizens access to a wealth of information previously only available to students who could attend one of the world's most recognized and respected universities.

We recently found out that OCW has adopted Plone as their online publishing environment.

From the OCW website:

"A New Publishing Environment for OCW

OCW is adopting a new, open-source publishing environment, Plone. Moving 1,981 courses along with all associated PDFs, images and other resources is going to take some time. For the next few weeks, you won't see any new courses on OCW, and we won't have a new feature in this space. But the whole site will still function as usual while we perform work behind the scenes, and you can look forward to new courses again in early June."


Plone 4.1 Framework Team Named


Congratulations, and thanks, to the members of the new Plone 4.x Framework Team:

Alec Mitchell
Ross Patterson
Laurence Rowe
Matthew Wilkes
Martijn Pieters
Rob Gietema
Elizabeth Leddy
Craig A. Haynal

The 4.x Framework Team will be responsible for evaluating improvement proposals and implementations for Plone 4.1 and subsequent releases in the 4.x series.

This team has a lot of experience: Alec, Ross, Laurence, Matthew and Martijn all served on previous framework teams. Rob and Craig both did guest reviews for the 4.0 Framework Team. And Elizabeth is a master integrator who's been cataloging resources for use of Plone in high-demand situations.

The new framework team was chosen by a working group of Framework Team members and alums. The 4.x Framework Team will work alongside the Plone 5 Framework Team, with both releases under active development.


David Brenneman and Mark Corum Named the Newest Members of the Plone Foundation


Please welcome Mark Corum and David Brenneman to the Plone Foundation membership!

David is a long-time, active community member who has participated in many sprints in Europe and North America, made contributions to the Plone core, Archetypes and the collective, and was principle organizer of the 2010 Tahoe Dexterity Sprint.

Mark leads the Plone Marketing team, is currently a member of the Foundation Board, and works at the University of Virginia.


PloneEdu Website Officially Launched at Plone Symposium East 2010


PloneEdu, a community promoting Plone for web publishing in education, was launched at Plone Symposium East 2010 at Penn State.

PloneEdu members will guide and collaborate with individuals and teams in all levels and types of education. "We want to build bridges between the innovative Plone community and the educational sector," says Michael J. Halm, Director and Senior Strategist at WebLion and Co-Chair of the PloneEdu Steering Team. "The goal is to create a community that supports the needs of decision makers, developers and integrators, website administrators and web content owners."

The fast-growing PloneEdu network includes schools, universities and related institutions worldwide. These organizations have discovered the benefits of using the powerful content management system to reduce costs, streamline processes, assure best-in-class security, and provide flexible integration with current systems.

For more information about PloneEdu and how to participate, visit weblion.psu.edu/ploneedu and follow the instructions for joining the PloneEdu community.

 

Plone to Be Represented at OSCON 2010


Plone with be among the products represented at this years OSCON, Open Source Convention in Portland's Oregon Convention Center.  The conference, presented by OReilly, run from July 19th through 23rd.

Calvin Hendryx-Parker, of Six Feet Up, will be representing Plone with the help of a grant from the Plone Foundation.  According to Calvin, "OSCON is an excellent opportunity for the Plone CMS to gain exposure in the open source world. It isn't often that you get so many diverse projects and people in one location."

Since 1998, OSCON has been bringing together tech’s visionaries and hackers to explore all that open source has to offer. As the pace of innovation accelerates, OSCON provides a central place to gain exposure to and evaluate the new projects, tools, services, platforms, languages, software, and standards sweeping through the open source community. As open source becomes fully integrated into the corporate environment, OSCON helps to define what it means to be open source. This annual convention has become one of the most important places to make open source related announcements, and to unveil projects and products.  You can find out more at oscon.com .

 

Sauna Sprint 2010 - July 27 in Helsinki, Finland


As computing events become more and more polished, expensive and involved, the Sauna Sprint in Helsinki, Finland offers a very simple proposition.  Let "normal" Plone programmers who are sprinting of general Plone topics (and covering most of their own expenses) work with Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) students at universities, institutes and technical schools in Europe awarding an engineering degree.

EESTEC is a non-political, non-profit organization for EESC students and is sponsoring the event. Since this sprint is an official EESTEC event, all accommodation and food expenses for students are covered by the organizer, LC Helsinki. The main thing that the students need to cover themselves are their travel expenses. However, if we are lucky and get lots of sponsors and donations, we'll be able to cover a part of these expenses as well.

EESTEC sprinters will be divided into smaller groups based on their experience with Plone. During the sprint they will get introduced to Plone, how to use is as a power user and how to develop with it. Those with previous experience will work on documenting and bugfixing eestec.net,  EESTEC's Plone portal.

You can find out more about the Sauna Sprint by visiting http://plone.org/events/community/sauna-sprint-2010/

You can help by sponsoring or by donating! (http://saunasprint.chipin.com/)


Living Statues Sprint 2010 Coming to Arnhem, The Netherlands August 25-29


Four Digits < http://fourdigits.nl/ > will be hosting a sprint August 25-29 in Arnhem, The Netherlands which will focus on tasks for upcoming Plone 4 and Plone 5 releases.  Potential topics include Deco, Blocks and Collections - and suggestions are more than welcome.

The sprint will be held during the World Championship for Living Statues, which will take place on August 30th (sunday). The very best national and international living statues will be performing from 13.00 until 17.00 hrs. At the same time, the amateurs will compete for the National Championship. This will take place in the city center of Arnhem at walking distance of the Four Digits office.

The sprint has room for about 30 sprinters and the staff of Four Digits in glad to help find a suitable hotel among the many nearby.

You can find out more by visiting http://plone.org/events/community/living-statues-sprint-2010



NewGlobalCitizens.org Wins Best Plone-Powered Site of the Year at 2010 CMS Expo


NewGlobalCitizens.org recently won Best Plone-Powered Site of the Year at the 2010 CMS Expo in Chicago. This year marked the 4th professional gathering of the CMS Community from around the world, with a focus on delivering highly useful information, tips, tricks and actionable advice to all attendees. The award recognizes a great organization and the importance of a solid website to a nonprofit.

Plone was one of the featured tracks at this year's CMSExpo, which showcases the best in web content management and is organized by the Content Management System Association. The best nonprofit website award went to a Plone website created by ifPeople for New Global Citizens.

For New Global Citizens, the effort to build a new website and operate on a new communications platform could not have been accomplished without first realizing that an investment in technology was the key to sustaining the growth of their organization. Operating with a limited staff, NGC now has a greater ability to share and interact with students in over 50 high schools around the country. The staff can see all information about students, teachers, and donors in one system. And NGC's core processes around team formation, action, and reporting were turned into a pipeline that staff could manage easily, saving them time by making their key information visible. The team at ifPeople also handled extensive remote and on site training to support user adoption and ensure NGC was up and running successfully with two new technologies.

Christopher Johnson represented ifPeople at this year's Expo and gave a talk on Plone add-on products, introducing new Plone users to products they can leverage for their website. Chris highlighted one key area of interest from last year's Expo‚the Plone-to-CRM (client relationship management) integration‚ and included a section demoing the simple parts of Plone-to-salesforce integrations into his presentation. Plone's Salesforce integration products were also the recipient of the Best Plone App award at the CMSExpo!

 

Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences Named Best Plone-Powered Education site at CMS Expo 2010


Boston-based Jazkarta was recently awarded for Best Plone-Powered Education Website for the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences website. The award was presented at the CMS Expo 2010 in Chicago.

Jazkarta President and Founder Nate Aune, was quick to share credit for the award.  "I must commend the Harvard SEAS team for all their hard work in migrating the content to the website and intranet, and for being champions of Plone within the school. Mike Trachtman, the project manager, stayed cool and focused during challenging times. Thanks to everyone at Harvard SEAS for giving us this opportunity to work with you."

Within the Harvard community, the SEAS website has gotten some kudos as well. It was voted the Best Harvard Website by the Harvard Voice, Harvard's student-life magazine.

You can visit the site at http://www.seas.harvard.edu/


Plone Teams with Google as Part of Google Summer of Code


After having proposals accepted by the Plone Foundation four university students have started working on improving Plone, thanks to funding from Google.

The Google Summer of Code is a global program that offers students generous stipends to write code for various open source software projects during their summer holidays. This is the fifth year Plone has participated in the programme and has accepted four projects, listed below.

AJAXIFY PloneFormGen form editing by Nenad Mancevic (Manca), mentored by Steve McMahon (SteveM).
PloneFormGen is a very popular add-on product for Plone that allows content editors to create very powerful forms for managing user interaction. This project will make the FormGen editing process more dynamic and even easier to use by introducing a new jQuery powered front-end for creating and modifying forms. Core tiles development

Core tiles development by Israel Saeta Perez (dukebody), mentored by Martin Aspeli (optilude).
Deco is a revolutionary page composition system heavily based on semantic HTML and middleware software (either WSGI or using a post-publication hook) being developed by a group of Plone core developers with the hope of including it in Plone 5. The underlying Deco architecture, based on the concepts of panels and tiles, needs to be supplemented with a set of core tiles such as images, videos, navigation etc,. in order to design useful pages. This project aims to implement these tiles and continue the development of the tiles, blocks and page management backends. Simplifying the Plone TTW theme customization experience

Simplifying the Plone TTW theme customization experience by David Bain (pigeonflight), mentored by David Glick (davisagli).
The experience of creating or customizing a Plone theme needs to be simplified. This project aims to simplify the experience of through the web (TTW) theme customisation and integrate it into our existing theming story. This aims to replace the existing customisation tools with a single unified tool that makes life easier for skinners. CMIS for Plone (cmis4plone)

CMIS for Plone (cmis4plone) by Leilei Zhu, mentored by Eric Steele (esteele) and Weblion.
The Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) standard defines away for applications to work with one or more Content Management repositories/systems. This project is about developing a useful subset of this specification to increase interoperability between Plone and other CMSes. This follows on from the hugely successful work done in last year's Summer of Code by Chelsea Bingel and Michael Mulich, also mentored by the Weblion team at Penn State University.

These projects are hugely useful for the Plone and the open source community in general, more news will be posted here in due course but following http://planet.plone.org is the best way to keep completely up to date with progress on these projects