News from the Plone-iverse – March 2012

Catch up on the headlines and interesting stories that shaped the Plone community in March 2012

Plone Open Garden 2012

For the sixth year in a row the appreciated event is going to happen on 2-4 May in Sorrento, Italy, among the colours and scents of the garden of the Hotel Mediterraneo.

Since 2007, the Plone Open Garden (PLOG) has become a pleasant “tradition” for all those who work or are interested in Plone and opensource technologies. In the comfortable, informal and enjoyable background of the Mediterranean nature, people can discuss and communicate their ideas and experiences, make long lasting friends and partnerships, relax enjoying the amazing beauties of the site, and much more.

So, what are you waiting for? This year, Abstract is waiting for you, to make you live a unique experience!

Find out more about PLOG at http://www.abstract.it/abstract-en/initiative/plone-open-garden-2012

Schedule of Speakers and Talks Announced for Plone Symposium East 2012

PSE12 published their schedule of talks for the upcoming event at Penn State University today. Its a lineup of new and old faces in the Plone community with a variety of topics that should appeal to attendees of every bent.

You can see the talks on their schedule page - with each talk on the schedule attached to the abstract of the talk so you can easily pick what you are interested it.

This will be the 5th Plone Symposium East, a ritual for Plone enthusiasts all over the US and abroad.  The event's focus on educational talks as well as general interest material has long made it a favorite from Plonistas  The event is held in State College, Pennsylvania, May 22 and 23, 2012.

World Plone Day, April 25th 2012

The World Plone Day (WPD) is a worldwide event to promote and educate the worldwide public about of the benefits of using Plone.

The World Plone Day (WPD) is an event held by Plone community around the world to promote the benefits of using Plone. Indeed, the WPD is much more than a single event, is a series of events held by companies, organizations, user groups and individuals. In four previous editions of the WPD more than 170 events were held in 36 countries around the world.

And no matter the size of the event. You can make a small speech to a group of friends, or organize a conference to a large audience. The important thing is to talk about Plone.
How to participate

You can join one of the events will be held this year. Check the list and see what the event nearest you. >> Organize a Event <<

If you prefer you can hold your own event. In the coming days we will publish a series of materials to help event organizers.

For now you can register your event and help spread the WPD

PSE12 Rocks with Great Training

Plone Symposium East 2012 has training opportunities for everyone.

Whether you are a newbie to Plone and Python, or a seasoned pro, there is something for everyone at this year's Pre-Symposium Training Events at Plone Symposium East 2012.  We have some of the best trainer in the Plone and Python community offering some great workshops. This selection will certainly have something for everyone.

Python Fundamentals - Chris Calloway - May 19, 20, 21
Learn the rudiments of Python in three days. This class is highly interactive and you will learn by doing. After this class you will be able to understand Python expressions and statements used in Plone. This class is an abbreviated and condensed version of the week-long PyCamp.

Theming Plone 4 - Chrissy WainWright - May 20, 21
This training session includes front-end template development of a Plone 4 site from start to finish using Diazo along with traditional theming. The training will be a hands-on walkthrough of the process, using a pre-created sample design. Attendees will need their computers and will be expected to follow along on their own Plone instances. It will be split into two days: Basic and Advanced. Attendees will have the choice to sign up for only the basic day or for both days.

Creating Plone Content Types with Dexterity - Steve McMahon - May 20, 21
Creating new content types in Plone is easier than ever. Dexterity, Plone's new content-type development framework, allows you to create content types through-the-web, in add-on products, or even to move back and forth between the two. Dexterity will be built into Plone 4.3, but is ready to use now. The course will focus on practical use of Dexterity, with just enough theory and history to help students understand how Dexterity fits into Plone.

Getting Off the Ground with Plone - Cris Ewing - May 20, 21
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. You'll learn the best way 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 turn those quick victories into re-usable products you can deploy in minutes. The first day of teaching will focus on working in a web browser, and the second day will move to creating installable packages on the file system.

Managing Agile Plone Projects - Sally Kleinfeldt - May 21
All the pieces have fallen into place for that big website project. You've chosen Plone, you've lined up the budget, you've gathered a team of developers, you've selected a design firm. You've worked with all the stakeholders and come up with a long list of features. Plone and its add-ons will provide many of them, but some will need custom development. How are you going to manage the project?

Visit this page to find out more and sign up for training before PSE2012

Report from Cioppino Sprint 2012

(The following writeup was provided by David Glick.  Thanks for your help!)

I've just returned from yet another memorable Plone event, the 2nd annual Cioppino Sprint. For the past 4 days, twelve of us gathered at a house in lovely Bodega Bay, CA for a weekend of fun, relaxation, and giving back to the Plone community.

The theme of the sprint was improving Plone's documentation and community infrastructure. On the first evening we gathered to brainstorm tasks, which were recorded on sticky notes to be placed on a scrum board indicating which tasks were pending, in progress, and complete. On Saturday, the sprinting began in earnest.

Tasks completed

Ross Patterson wrote a tutorial introducing the basics of zc.buildout. He also started investigating what it would take to let Plone be installed by Microsoft's free Web Platform Installer for Windows/IIS.

Luke Brannon and Ross wrote some CSS for reStructuredText "admonishments" (i.e. note/warning/etc. boxes) that will be added to plone.org for when reST documents are rendered. Luke also refactored and tested Windows installation instructions in the knowledgebase, reviewed KB articles for accurate version metadata, and started looking into sorting KB topic pages by Plone version in addition to modified date.

Spanky Kapanka learned how to contribute to the collective developer manual, then worked on writing several quick start guides to walk Plone beginners through specific tasks. He completed one on subclassing a content type and started one on creating a custom form.

Bill Deegan edited the introduction to the collective developer manual for clarity and to present Plone's capabilities in a more positive light alongside the fair warnings of complexity. He also renamed the files in the collective docs to have a .rst extension so they render when viewed on github, and tested Spanky's quick start.

Mike Cullerton learned git and reStructuredText, then worked on a "quick start" guide on customizing views and viewlets.

Liz Leddy worked on a new set of documentation of how to do Plone core development, which will live in the coredev buildout. She also did a lot of cleanup in Plone's trac and moved information to buildout.coredev and to a new, streamlined "Get Involved" landing page which replaces the front page of trac as an entry point to participating in the Plone community.

Steve McMahon worked on writing a Plone sysadmin manual discussing how to install and configure Plone for deployment scenarios on various platforms. I think he is about two-thirds done and has not published the document yet.

Tyler Randles (of ploneconf panda head fame) and I worked on improving the template for the knowledgebase documentation. We added a box at the top which shows a color-coded warning about the document's version compatibility, and a box at the bottom with a brief invitation to contribute to editing the knowledgebase (you too can help review KB articles to make sure their metadata is correct!). We also created mr.crabby, your blue crabby friend for Plone—can you find him on plone.org? (Hint: search plone.org for info on the Cioppino Sprint.) Tyler also worked on illustrations for Steve's manual.

David Glick, also added a version selector to the search forms in the plone.org documentation section, fixed a bug in the knowledgebase permissions so that articles are actually editable by the right people (i.e. anyone logged in), reviewed some of Liz's core dev docs, added i18n support to plone.supermodel and plone.registry's GenericSetup import handler in order to fix a Plone 4.2 blocker, and did some planning about how to better organize Dexterity's documentation.

Fulvio Casali reviewed and tried out the existing Dexterity documentation and created a detailed list of suggested improvements which will be very helpful.

Florian Friesdorf wrote instructions for setting up a Plone development environment using nix, and added support for paged searches to pas.plugins.ldap.

Eric Steele worked on getting Plone 4.2 ready for final release, including a lot of work on the new-style collections. (It needed some work on the date criteria for feature parity with the existing collections, and some work to make sure that Plone's default news and event collections are the new style.) By the end of the sprint Eric announced that there are no more blockers for the second release candidate!

Hanno Schlichting joined the #sprint IRC channel remotely and continued his quest for an improved ZCatalog. He suggested some catalog optimizations for plone.org which I will hopefully review soon, and implemented two long-desired new features: "not" queries and sorting results by multiple indexes.

LolaLola and Zoey, the dogs, sprinted along the beach and made themselves generally lovable.

Plone Welcomes New Contributors

We'd like to welcome the newest members of the contributors group and say how much we appreciate your deciding to be involved and sign up to add  your code to Plone

The latest new contributors are:

Marcelo Silvestre
Mike Rhodes
Daniel Kraft
Thomas Massman
Kai Hoppert
Jörg Baach
T. Kim Nguyen
John Hren