Training Schedule for Plone Symposium East Now Available

A full listing of the pre-conference training at Plone Symposium East (PSE) at Penn State University is now available.

As the April 11th deadline for earlybird registrations for the Plone Symposium East (PSE) at Penn State University nears, a full listing of the pre-conference training is now available though their training page.   Seven classes will be taught over the two days of training May 16 and 17th in classrooms of the Smeal Business Building on the Penn State campus.

Registration for classes is NOT being handled through the Symposium.  Contact the trainers via links on the training page to sign up for classes.

The classes are:

Theming Plone 4


Chrissy Wainwright will be teaching a two-day class on Theming Plone 4.

This training session includes front-end design of a Plone 4.0 site from start to finish using two methods: Traditional Plone theming, and using Diazo (XDV).  The training will be a hands-on, introductory walk-through of the process, using a pre-created sample design. Attendees will need their computers and will be expected to follow along on their own local instances.

The training will cover paster, base themes, base_properties/DTML, Generic Setup, customizing and creating viewlets, portlets, templates, and theming with Diazo.

Chrissy Wainwright, Six Feet Up's Senior Template Developer has implemented Plone themes for dozens of sites, including indianahistory.org, uvahealth.com, and itsoc.org.  She has taught Plone theming classes for several years, including last year's PSE.  In addition to being a Plone Core contributor, she is also an active developer on KARL.

The cost is $350 before April 11, then will be $395.  You can register for the class here.

Creating Custom Content Types in Plone 4


Steve McMahon will be teaching a two-day introduction to creating Dexterity content types.

With Plone 4, the Dexterity content-type-development framework has become a practical and desirable alternative to the Archetypes framework Plone has featured in previous versions. This course will show how it's possible to use Dexterity now to build reliable and maintainable new content types for Plone 4+.

Steve is a member of the Plone Foundation Board and a Plone consultant and integrator specializing in non-profit organizations. He's also the creator of PloneFormGen, and well known as a speaker in the Plone community all over the world. If you are active on the #plone IRC channel, you probably already know him as SteveM.

Registration information will be available soon on the PSE training page.

Getting Off the Ground with Plone


Chris Ewing will be teaching a two-day introduction to Plone class.

So you've heard about Plone, this smart, secure and powerful content management system and you'd like to get started. Where to begin? This training course is for you. Over two days of hands-on, well-paced work you'll learn how to install Plone, how to create your first website and get started adding content, how to get quick, simple victories for your new project, and how to deploy your site when you're ready to go live. You'll focus on small-scale, achievable goals, and learn where to go when you're ready for bigger steps. Attendees will be expected to bring a computer with a text editor and be unafraid to try new things.

Chris is a developer at the University of Washington's Radiology Department, and a veteran speaker at many Plone conferences.  His work with getting Plone hosting off the ground at University of Washington makes him highly qualified to speak on this topic.

Registration information will be available soon on the PSE training page.

Getting Started with Plone Hosting on Amazon EC2


Nate Aune will teach a one-day class on hosting Plone on Amazon EC2 on May 16th. 

This training will guide you through the best practices for architecting your Plone hosting infrastructure on Amazon EC2, and introduce you to various tools to automate and make repeatable deployments.  Hands on examples will be used and at the end of the course, you will have a working production buildout that you can use for further exploration.

Nate is the President and Founder of Boston, Massachusetts-based Jazkarta. He has been helping organizations with their IT needs since 1999. As founder of the Plone4Artists project, Boston Plone Users Group and a member of the Plone Foundation Board for 3 years, Nate is very active in the Plone community, regularly gives talks at conferences and organizes sprints.

Registration information will be available soon on the PSE training page.

Theme your Plone site with Diazo


Nate Aune will teach a one-day class on hosting Plone Diazo theming on May 17th. 

Diazo is the new name for XDV, the emerging framework for theming Plone sites. If used properly, Diazo drastically reduces the time it takes to theme a new Plone site. This training session will give students exercises to theme a Plone site from scratch, and fully grasp the concepts that make Diazo such a flexible and powerful technology. We will look at how to activate the Plone editing interface within a themed site, and many other tricks to get the most out of Diazo.

Nate is the President and Founder of Boston, Massachusetts-based Jazkarta. He has been helping organizations with their IT needs since 1999. As founder of the Plone4Artists project, Boston Plone Users Group and a member of the Plone Foundation Board for 3 years, Nate is very active in the Plone community, regularly gives talks at conferences and organizes sprints.

Registration information will be available soon on the PSE training page.

Plone Site Administration


Alex Clark will teach a one day class May 17th on administering Plone websites (based on his Book "Plone 3.3 Site Administration" available from Packt).

The goal of this one day course is to make attendees more confident about what they do with Plone in their development environment. Subsequently, this should make them more confident with what they can do with Plone in their production environment. Which in turn, should make the attendee's boss or clients more happy about what Plone can do for them in their business environment.  Since the world of Plone administration has changed significantly since last year, this class will also focus on changes for Plone 4 and, time permitting, "what's hot" in Plone deployments - such as WSGI, Hostout and Funnelweb.

Founding partner and lead developer of aclark.net, llc; Alex Clark is an author, Plone Foundation member and former Plone Infrastructure Team leader as well as the organizer of Plone Conference 2008.  In addition to literally writing the book on Plone Administration, he's been and active admin of Plone.org, and a long-term speaker and participant in Plone events for years.

The cost is $200 before April 17, then will be $350. (The student cost is $250 after April 17th.) You can register for the class here.

Content Provider Training


Rose Pruyne is teaching a one day class on training content providers on May 16th.

This workshop is for content managers and content providers with beginning or intermediate-level knowledge of Plone. Participants will learn how to make the best use of Plone's many content-management features in a low-pressure setting with experts there to help and answer your questions.

Rose is a Programmer-Analyst in the WebLion Group at Penn State University. She has been working with Zope and Plone since January 2007. Rose chairs the WebLion Documentation Group and is an adviser for PloneEdu

Registration information will be available soon on the PSE training page.