Recognizing the need for training in customizing the look & feel of Plone, C Squared (C2E) will start hosting quarterly training sessions focused on the “art of theming”.  Our first 3 day session is tentatively scheduled for March of 2009 (depending on response) and will focus on creating a Plone 3 theme.  Trainees will be able to convert a photoshop file to an installable Plone 3 theme product. Training will include comprehensive css training (with more focus on Plone specific css), making sense of viewlets and portlets, adding your own css and javascript files, understanding generic setup profiles (making your changes in the zmi and exporting) and best practices for theming Plone sites.
Knowledge of Python is not necessary but basic knowledge of *nix or windows command line and comfort with working on the filesystem is suggested. An introduction to the future of Plone theming (Deliverance) will be included.

Please start by filling out the following survey so I can gauge interest and plan accordingly

Creating Plone 3 Themes and Custom Views

Projected cost (to cover rental of facility, catering and the training itself) is $800 for a 3 day session

Thank You

Yesterday, November 7th, 2008, the first ever World Plone Day went off swimmingly. Granted, some of us had smaller than we would have liked response, but that is partly our fault as we needed to push a little harder on the promotion/publication side. Although I have to say, publicly, that Gerry Kirk did a phenomenonal job on the online promotion front. Hopefully next year we can get more hands and eyes on this and escalate the webwide promotion.

We held our session at The PlugandPlayTechCenter in Sunnyvale, CA. I rented a small conference room from 9am - 4pm and provided lunch vouchers to attendees. Coffee, donuts and fruit were available too.

I wasn’t sure what to expect as my RSVP’s totalled 8 people. Of those 8 people that signed up, 5 showed up. So what does one do when there are only 5 other people at your World Plone Day event? One appreciates the fact that there were 5 people at your event!

That said, I truly believe that this local event was successful and I’m looking forward to World Plone Day 2009.

Why did I think this event was successful even with a low turnout? Couple of reasons actually and the foremost being that I met five individuals in my area who are interested in Plone. A user group was born (ZPUG Valley) and I’m anticipating that as a result of our smaller session we had the opportunity to really “sell” Plone to those who attended who weren’t sure yet. We had the following:

A Plone consultant (Ross Patterson - see his blog post about his experience)
A Python programmer (with no Plone experience at all, some Zope though)
3 attendees who have Plone sites version 2.0.4! They were evaluating whether to migrate to Plone 3 or not.

The python programmer was there to evaluate whether it was worthwhile to learn Plone. He wound up staying the entire day and in the second half of the day he and Ross installed Plone on his CentOS virtual machine. He walked away with a new install of Plone on his laptop.

So what did I learn? Next time I won’t try and plan this event myself. The biggest thing I got out of this local event was that it really needs more than one person to coordinate. Next year we will work together and the event will be larger and I believe more interesting.

We will offer a wider range of sessions for the day. I was more focused on providing an introduction to Plone, which it turns out went over really well for my audience. If we have more levels of attendees next year then we will definitely need “tracks” of a sort for those evaluating Plone, new to Plone, integrators and developers.

As I sit here and reflect on yesterday it just blows me away how much was accomplished worldwide and I’m excited for what the future holds for Plone. This community is strong, solid and growing.

Thank you for letting us be a part of the growth of Plone! (I’m tempted to say “Yes we can” but I won’t)

Ross Patterson and Glenn Jarvis - Mini Plone Installfest

On November 7, 2008 C Squared Enterprises will be participating in the “World Plone Day” event.

We will be hosting two sessions, one in the morning (10:00am -noon) and one in the afternoon (1pm - 3pm).

We will present an introduction to Plone and then take questions about Plone from participants. Lunch will be provided and we will give away up to 6 books - including the new version of :”The Definitive Guide to Plone” and the “Plone: Through the Web” book due out real soon (winners of the last two books will receive their prize when the books are published).

We will provide lunch and encourage open discussion and networking.

After the event, all that are interested will travel over to Fry’s Electronics for coffee.

More information about our World Plone Day event at http://www.plone.org/wpd/san-jose-california

No matter where you are, meet Plone and discover the benefits of using it in education, government, ngos, and in business.

Hope to see you there!!

If you were considering submitting a proposal for  Plone tutorial today is the deadline.

http://us.pycon.org/2009/tutorials/proposals/

I probably won’t be able to attend (though I’d like to) but didn’t want our community to miss out on the opportunity to evangelize and promote Plone!

Also, keep an eye out for OSCON 2009 in July (I will definitely be attending as it’s here in California this year)

As a long time “user” and “integrator” of Plone I wanted to evaluate the difference between two Open Source cms communities as I have the opportunity to work with Plone and WebGui on two projects simultaneously.

Initial differences (I could be mistaken on some of these points, so please correct me if something has changed):

• Plone is written in Python, WebGUI is based on Perl
• Plone uses the Zope Application Server, WebGUI uses WRE (WebGUI Runtime Environment)
• Plone has both a browser interface (Zope Management Interface) and filesystem access, WebGUI has a browser based interface for customization and development.
• Plone has multiple third-party products for things like blogs, forums, ecommerce that are developed by multiple authors (examples, GetPaid, EasyShop Quills, CoreBlog, Scrawl), WebGUI has one blog, one ecommerce offering, one forum offering, all included in the core, all worked on by the core development team (I’m planning an entire blog post about this particular topic). Add-ons for WebGUI are feature enhancements and themes.
• It’s easier to install Plone for testing and development (thanks to the unified installer), WebGUI has a VMWare image but I wasn’t able to get it installed, my very technical boyfriend had to set up an instance for me.
• Plone is supported by the Plone Foundation, WebGUI is supported by Plain Black, Inc.

According to ohloh.net Plone has a much more active community but the WebGUI project is in the top 10% of javascript projects for their commenting practices .

Initial similarities:

Plone and WebGUI cannot be hosted on $8.00 a month environments (WebGUI requires root access to stop and start mod_perl, apache, mySQL, etc, although you can restart them through the WRE browser interface too after you get everything setup)
Plone and WebGUI can be installed on any OS
Plone and WebGUI both have a high learning curve (we purchased 4 WebGUI books just to get started, which we are still waiting for, hoping we get them next week)
Plone and WebGUI are being used in University and Government projects
Plone and WebGUI have been around for a long time (both went official in 2001)

Plone as a community is much larger than WebGUI. WebGUI appears to be a core group of developers, very tightly knit and controlled. No questions like..”Who is maintaining project x?”. I haven’t decided yet which is better, we will see as I get further into actual integration. So far the WebGUI guys (and gals) have been very accepting of a couple of Plonista’s encroaching on their channel. They know I am a long-time Plone integrator and yet they are extremely helpful.

Next article - Comparing Plone to WebGUI - Part 2
Quality vs Quantity: Comparing offering multiple “third-party” products to including core products that have been tested

I have been in the business of selling technology services since 2000. When I started my partner and I decided we would not go the way of $8.00 a month hosting providers. The customer support required would have wiped us out years ago.

I am in the process of redefining our services and have been following all the twittering about Rackspace and cloud computing. One of the companies I admire, Jazkarta, has moved to offering hosting through Amazon’s cloud services (EC2).  It’s an intriguing idea and I haven’t decided against it yet, but I tend to be conservative and want to be sure this really does make sense for us and is safe.

We looked at Google’s cloud offering along with Amazon a year ago and decided against it because it just seemed so new and rife with the potential to rack up a huge bill (kind of like Google’s AdWords and suddenly getting a gazillion clicks you have to pay for!). So we decided to wait and see. Now a year later cloud computing is attracting everyone from the service provider to the enterprise CIO looking to cut IT costs.

This worries me, not because I feel threatened as a provider of IT services, but because I’m not quite convinced that this is the “safest” or “best” solution for the enterprise. I can remember working with a hosting company that offered FreeBSD jails to clients (my client was already hosted there and needed Plone support). Everyone shared resources, clients basically received a directory on the filesystem and software (php,python, etc) was installed on the system for everyone to use. Worst experience ever, hosting vendor decided to upgrade Python on the server. I spent 3 days trying to get a hold of said vendor (didn’t return calls) and trying to get 2 sites that got taken down by this global upgrade back online. Those clients are now hosted with us in their own xen based virtual machine.

So one of the first things I did was put “downsides to cloud computing” in Google:

Voice of the Customer: Trend Spotting -  Cloud Computing

What are the downsides to cloud computing? Solutions may be subject to low availability, internet connections may be slow or servers may become infected (Google App Engine, a service for developers, was crippled for several hours last month, blaming the outage on a database server bug) . Solutions may be through multitenant or shared services, not an ideal solution for regulated businesses or hyper secure applications. In addition, application customization may be limited. Finally, if your data structure does not follow commonly accepted data practices, there may be compatibility issues between your data and the host data servers.

This may have improved and I suppose for applications that do not have “security” concerns, Cloud Computing can be an excellent way to manage IT services. As someone who deals with clients who are concerned about security this may not work.

Outsourcing IT has always been a hit-or-miss scenario and I think we need to take a step back before everyone jumps on board with the hope of “saving money”. Something that hasn’t been mentioned here is the human element of IT. Granted being able to scale resources and only use what needed is a great thing. At the same time it makes me nervous to allocate control to a cloud service with a third party that doesn’t know my clients and what they need.

I think cloud computing has it’s place but will it replace smaller IT companies that offer one-on-one support and consultation?

No.

Will it provide clients and providers with more options?

Absolutely.

Is it secure and scalable and free from the same potential issues as non-cloud hosting services?

Security, depends on the level you want. Scalable, yes it’s scalable but is it flexible? Cloud computing will introduce different issues than it’s non-cloud counterpart. Those remain to be seen.

I’m still not sold on Cloud Computing but it is definitely an interesting concept. I don’t think the mom&pop tech companies need worry, yet.

So I know I’m not the first and I most definitely won’t be the last to jump inside the Ubuntu “circle of love”.

My boyfriend warns me that Ubuntu may go the way of some other long-gone Linux Distro’s but I say, “pah, you pessimist!” and he just grunts and gives me that “you question my wisdom?” look over the top of his glasses. I on the other hand am very much a girlie (even at 44 years old) and I love pretty wallpapers and sexy themes and neato plasmoids that “do things”, like rotate pics of my kids or keep me updated on my twitter stream.

I don’t have enough experience to say one way or the other if Ubuntu has the staying power to outlast anything thrown at it. As a virtual noob, It looks like it to me. I’ve had a hell of a time letting go of Windows (I still have Windows on my office desktop and my hp tablet pc) I’m starting to lean more and more towards an all Ubuntu lifestyle (almost all, I like the ability to play a PC game on occasion). If *nix starts distributing PC Games for the mainstream you bet I’m dropping Windows.

I started the move to Ubuntu because after discovering Virtual Box over a year ago and installing Debian and Ubuntu on virtual machines on my system I started to use my *nix based virtual box more than my Windows host. I love to work on websites through sftp and using Kate Text Editor to work on css files (and Plone templates). Now I have Windows Vista in a virtual box on my Ubuntu Intrepid 8.10 machine, my Ubuntu machine is a week old. I haven’t needed my Windows Vista VM for a few days.
I’m getting really weird about it. Boyfriend calls it being “geeky” but last night I was up until 2am installing OpenOffice.org 3.0 and Amarok. I had broken the sound on my Ubuntu box, the boyfriend says it’s because I didn’t have any speakers connected (silly man, you weren’t there when I was on the floor plugging in one of many speaker sets I have hanging around, but ok, yes I didn’t have any speakers connected) I have sound on Ubuntu that’s all that matters. Next challenge is getting Flash working right, I can see stuff, but no sound on flash yet.

My goal here is to bring my Ubuntu install as close as possible to what I am used to but with the added stability and reduction in overall cost of a *nix based machine. My kids machines are next.

I’m a little disappointed in the “look” of OpenOffice. Shallow and selfish of me I’m sure but I can’t help but love the Mac “look” and the Windows Office “ribbon”. It appeals to my highly visual nature. I don’t like grey, partly because it reminds me of all the times my dad (a C programmer and database administrator for over 30 years) tried to get me interested in computers and programming. “hah, no way dad, I’m going to be an aaaactrrrress” (not a misspell there, that’s how you say it, with emphasis)

Flash forward 30 years, guess what I’m not I’m not a programmer and I’m not an actress I’m a designer with a penchant for templating cms systems. Just shoot me now.

Andy McKay responded to my post on his own blog, something I appreciate because much of what he said is right in line with where my head is at right now. I’m finding myself moving away from recommending Plone to clients, even in a situation where Plone’s features are exactly what they need.

A large number of competent and happy integrators is key to Plone, without them it will wither at either end as it slips into the domain of more and more technical obscurity know only to a few. They are one of the key bridges between the techies and customers.

Andy, I’d say this comment is spot on:

Donna (and please correct me here if I’m wrong) runs a small consultancy producing web sites for customers. She doesn’t have a huge army of technical programmers behind her. She focuses on finding a solution for a client mostly using existing tools that can be customised to her user. At the Planning sprint we she was placed in a category called “integrators”.

A year ago (before we had our summit in February) I started whining about the changes to the theming process (got into a discussion between core developers and integrators who deal with clients on a day-to-day basis). When I left the summit I felt a bit better (though I pretty much got p0wned -as my kids call it - by a 14 year old theming wizard)

Now, over 9 months later I’ve created a dozen skins (or so) in Plone 3. I’m much more comfortable in the command line and I know my way around a virtualenv (and love it) Still can’t code python to save my life, but I can create a skin and deploy it!

Here is where I worry? I’m the exception (not the rule) as are Veda and Matthew Wilkes and Rob Porter and Denis (spliter). We’ve put in extra time and because of our connection to the community are willing to deal with the pain just to get really good at theming Plone sites. For some of us, we work for companies that deploy Plone sites, for others we work at a company that has a Plone site or sites that need maintaining. As I mentioned in my post after Linux World, Plone is not as well-known as it should be after nearly 10 years in existence (2011 will be 10 years).  Hopefully World Plone Day will help and the Evangelism team, led by Nate is lighting a fire under our collective behinds to get the word out about Plone.

It’s difficult really, trying to “please all of the people all of the time”, but that is not what we are looking at here. Trust me, as a mom who has raised six human beings with entirely different personalities I know that there has to be some sacrifice made by someone. We can’t all have what we want, all the time.

At the same time, as a professional who has daily interaction with a wide range of “customer” types from the mom&pop shop to the client with 500+ employees looking to streamline business processes online I’m getting to the point where I’m second guessing my recommendation to use Plone. It’s not fair to the client to pay way more than they should in development time because the “easiest” aspect of site creation  has crept into the programming side. We say that Plone separates content, programming and design. It has taken many of us years to get where we are and as new designers/integrators approach Plone with an eye on it’s features they are bug-eyed and shaking by the time we explain exactly what it takes to skin a Plone site. I witnessed that today as Veda tried to explain to a newcomer just what it would take to skin their newly loaded Plone site.

That said, what can we do as a community to fix this? In IRC today, Rob mentioned that Joel has created a sweet little “through-the-web” paster form. Love it, where was that when I was learning how to create themes with ZopeSkel?! A move in the right direction. Someone in channel(catherine-w) brought up a great point , ‘if you are new to Plone you won’t understand what this means’. So we need to stop “assuming” that because we understand it that  new adopters of Plone will understand at the same level we do. We need to continue to look at ways we can make adoption a much more positive experience! We have a terrific helpful community (Joanna, Veda, Darci, Alex, MatthewWilkes, et al) and Plone’s core feature-set is unrivalled (I’ve been doing a lot of testing/experimenting with various cms’s - ModX and WebGui being the most recent) so let’s keep this move towards improving the integrators experience moving towards the most user-friendly cms, it’s already the most featureful!

(cue six-million-dollar-man theme - doo doo doo doo)

Plone CMS
A cms clinging to life
People, we can enhance it
We have the technology
We have the capability to build the world’s friendliest cms
Plone will be that toolkit (product?)
We can make Plone even better than it was before
Better. Stronger. Faster

And on that note I shall go eat spaghetti that I cooked for the family. Lots of garlic and onion *exhale*

We are moving one of our Plone clients to WebGui. After extensive evaluation of all the other CMS’s out there, WebGui scored the highest based on the clients requirements and plans for expansion. WebGui is as “big” as Plone in that it’s definitely overkill for your standard brochure-ware site.

I am tasked with creating the “theme” for this new WebGui website. After some initial reading and talking to the WebGui guys I’m left with the feeling that we (Plone) are making skinning sites way too difficult. The primary culprit? Viewlets. When one of our star programmers has to create a third-party product (GloWorm) just to allow designers to change a footer or header in the site we need to rethink the way we are approaching this whole theming scenario. Deliverance is great, but really guys, how many of you really believe someone who is focused on the “visual” aspect of a site is going to learn xslt? It’s easier, but it still isn’t easy enough to attract more designers. We have less than a dozen individuals in our community of over 400 (guessing here) who actually can take a .psd and convert it to a Plone 3 theme (and most of us are still struggling, I’m not the only one). Look at our paltry offering of themes available now,? The OOTB theming group is working really hard to get as many out as possible.  We need to step up theme creation but that is not going to happen if there is not a dramatic change to the process of theming. It’s too painful. I do have to say though that buildout and eggs rock! I just hate viewlets (ok there I said it). As someone who works directly with clients in determining their requirements, there hasn’t been a single theme that we’ve done that didn’t require extensive changes to the viewlets (including different banners on inside sections and changes to drop downs in horizontal nav based on where you are located, etc etc). The fact that we have to turn off viewlets first, then add the new one and have to change at least 4 files to do that?? configure.zcml, viewlets.xml, viewlets.py and umm there was one more.

Now back to the WebGui theming. I’m just getting started and I’ve already ran into one thing that Plone really does right. Filesystem skin development rocks. WebGui does not offer filesystem skin development, yet. All “theming” has to be done in the browser (or offline in Dreamweaver and then pasted into the browser). They are working on this but as someone who has been doing file system development for a few years now, it’s something I’ll miss.

I have a large Plone project starting next week along with this WebGui project. I will write about the difference, what I really like and what bugs the heck out of me.

how geeky am I?

Firefox add-ons make me happy. I know it’s silly and it makes my boyfriend crazy. Why do you need yet another “blog” tool? Are you twittering your blog post or blogging your twitter?

ScribeFire is a blog editor in Firefox that lets me click on a small icon on the bottom of my Firefox as I work and/or surf and post to my Word Press blog. As a heavy duty user of Firebug it just came naturally. So will I post more often now that I’ve got this little reminder and a quicker way to post? mmm maybe.