Plone Advocate Andreas Mantke to Lead Site-Administration Workshop at 2012 LibreOffice Conference

The LibreOffice Berlin 2012 Conference takes place October 17-19 (registration is closed). For more information on Mantke’s workshop, see the conference's session page.

Andreas Mantke, a deputy member of the Board of Directors of the Document Foundation for LibreOffice will lead a workshop for new Plone site administrators in the LibreOffice community during its annual conference in October.

Mantke’s workshop will provide an introduction to managing content in Plone, using Plone’s site administration panel, working in the Zope Management Interface (ZMI), and using Buildout.

“The plan is to give attendees a step up on the ladder of administering Plone websites,” says Mantke. “They will have lots of opportunities to get their hands dirty.

“Attendees don’t need prior experience with Plone. But they should have working knowledge of Linux and an understanding of content management systems.”

The community surrounding LibreOffice, an open source office suite, has used Plone for documentation and other information since before 2005.

“Plone has worked well for us -- it’s stable, secure, and easy to set up and administer,” says Mantke. “The fact that Plone is distributed under the GNU Public License (GPL) is very important to our project and to me, personally. LibreOffice is distributed under the Lesser GNU Public License (LGPL); our communities are very similar.”

Mantke has been a member of the LibreOffice community since 2002, when it was known as OpenOffice.org. In addition to his work on the Documentation Foundation, he administers the community’s Plone sites, including the following:

“I created our extensions-and-templates repository using the PloneSoftwareCenter add-on,” says Mantke. “With help from Plone core developer Elizabeth Leddy, I was able to add features to the add-on, and I submitted some patches. We showcased the repository at our LibreOffice conference in Paris in 2011.

“This year I started customizing our conference management environment in Plone, using Dexterity. It’s not in its final state, but it’s functioning well for this year’s conference.”

Mantke’s goal is to get more members of the LibreOffice community excited about Plone, to get them involved in supporting the CMS. “Part of my plan for the workshop is to generate positive experience and a bit of enthusiasm,” he says. “I want to provide others with the knowledge to get a good start in Plone.”