Tag Archives: Plone

A review of “Plone 3 Theming”

Posted on August 25, 2009 by John| 2 Comments

I recently read Plone 3 Theming, a new book by Veda Williams. Although not presently working in Plone, I like to keep up with the Plone ecosystem. Should I find myself working on a new CMS, Plone will be one of my preferred technologies, so I need to nourish what few Plone neurons I’ve got.

Obligatory caveats

I bump into Veda at Seattle Plone Gathering meetings. I wouldn’t say we’re friends, but we are friendly.

BTW, the book has an online errata list.

Snap review

Buy this book if you’re working on any aspect of developing a Plone-based site. Even if you aren’t doing theming work, its informational goodies will come in handy. It’s written for the newbie-to-intermediate level, but I’ll wager that even advanced Plone site developers will learn a thing or two from this book.

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World Plone Day, Open Source Bridge, Friends, Bittersweet Chocolate

Posted on April 23, 2009 by John| 2 Comments

Yesterday’s World Plone Day in Seattle was interesting, and helped me think about a few matters.

Fifteen – 20 people were physically present, with another 10 watching via Brian Gershon‘s ustream.tv wizardry. (It was lower quality than a separate camcorder recording, due to a ustream.tv bug.) After Jon Stahl‘s introduction, Andrew Burkhalter, David Glick, and Cris Ewing previewed new Plone 4 technologies. Their talks rocked.

As I listened, I thought about what Fisher Communications lost when they killed their Internet division, which included shuttering our Plone project. I’m sad about the opportunity that Fisher walked away from, and the effects of inept management.

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Interesting Open Source Bridge talk proposals

Posted on April 10, 2009 by John| 5 Comments

Open Source Bridge‘s proposal deadline is 12:00 midnight tonight.

While I’m not personally interested in all of the proposed talks, they clearly have all had good thought put into them. Here are the ones that have piqued my curiosity:

The Scylla and Charybdis of Open Source Legalese

Using Open Source Principals to Save the Economy

Ubiquitous Angels

Open Source on the Farm

Perl is Undead

Managing the Passionate

Plone in the Cloud – deploying open source applications to Amazon EC2

5 things to know about MySQL if you don’t have a DBA

Assholes are killing your project

generation y, open source community building and the lessons that business is learning ( or should learn) from them both

Turn the Many into One: Using Deliverance to theme your web applications

Intro To Pydra – A Distributed Computing Framework For Python

Open Source Geographic Information Systems

Mercurial: basics to advanced techniques

Driving open source in the enterprise

Learning your authN-Zs

Making Twitter Suck Less With Perl

Open Source Tools In Computational Finance

Where’d my Files Go? A guide to Modern Ubuntu Distributions

Django: Thinking Outside The Blog

Agile Methodologies for Open Source Projects

Opinionated Frameworks for Opinionated Developers

Clustering Data — How to Have Fun in n-Dimensions

Open source: the business case

Layers of Caching: Key to scaling your website

Painless Project Estimation

“M” is for Manual: Creating Documentation for your Project

Web Server Shootout

How can open video become the new TV?

Bringing Newspapers into the future with Open Source

Mistakes We Knew We Were Making: A Cautionary Tale

Configuration Management Panel

The Linux Kernel Development model

Drupal, What is it Good For?

From Plone to Plinkit to Public Libraries

Write your own Bayesian Classifier: An Introduction to Machine Learning

Drizzle, Rethinking MySQL for the Web

If you’re interested by these or any of the other talks, then maybe I’ll see you at the conference?

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Idealware’s CMS comparison report

Posted on April 3, 2009 by John| 4 Comments

Idealware has published a report comparing four open-source CMSs. Its title: Comparing Open Source Content Management Systems: WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and Plone. (Is that a straightforward title, or what? Heh.) I read about it in a few blogs I follow.

Idealware's OSS CMS summary

Idealware's OSS CMS summary

If you’re interested in CMSs, I recommend this report. Here are some quotes to whet your appetite…

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Open Source Bridge 2009: Deadline approaching

Posted on March 14, 2009 by John| 1 Comment

If you’re thinking of giving a talk at Open Source Bridge 2009, you’d better hurry up and submit your proposal. Their submissions deadline is March 31!

At last count, they have 33 submissions on topics including Linux kernel development, Drupal, OSS project maintenance, Ruby, and Plone.

I’ve been working on getting the word out at UW’s Computer Science department. Through friends there, I got connected with undergraduate students doing open-source related research, like Scott Shawcroft. Scott put me in touch with Justine Sherry, the UW ACM student chapter’s vice-chair. I’m hoping we’ll some involvement from their CS student population, either for giving talks or attending the conference.

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Northwest Python Day

Posted on February 1, 2009 by John| 4 Comments

Yesterday was Northwest Python Day. All of the talks were great, and the day was immensely rewarding and enjoyable.

Andrew introduced me to Andy McKay, with whom I’ve traded a bit of e-mail but never met. It’s an oddity of today’s world that you can do business, or strike up a friendship via a few e-mail exchanges, with someone, without ever having actually met them.

Most of the attendees brought some food, and most of them brought breakfast food, and most of the breakfast food were doughnuts. We were swimming in doughnuts! Boy oh boy, there were a lot of doughnuts.

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Plone sprints at PyCon 2009?

Posted on January 25, 2009 by John| 2 Comments

I’m working on my plans for attending PyCon 2009. I don’t know whether to budget for the sprints — I’d stay for them if I could contribute to at least one. But, no sprints are listed yet…

If you’re considering organizing a Plone-related sprint, I’d like to hear from you, even if you’re not yet 100% sure. Or, write about it on your blog, so we can all hear about it. Or, propose a sprint so that it gets listed on the PyCon 2009 sprints page.

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Planet Plone Zookeeper: Almost There!

Posted on January 23, 2009 by John| 1 Comment

There’s just one small hiccup standing between me and my new blog list duties. Today might be the day!

Update @ 1/23: Alex Clark waved his magic wand, and I’m in! I closed three tickets today for new blog listings! Yee haw!

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I’m the new Planet Plone zookeeper

Posted on January 21, 2009 by John| 8 Comments

Gerry Kirk asked for volunteers to take over as the maintainer of Planet Plone’s blog list. I raised my hand, and Gerry quickly said, “Huzzah! We have a winner!”

I’m the new zookeeper. It seems like an easy job. And, a way to start contributing (in a teensy-weensy capacity) to the Plone community.

Tonight, I have, alas, a small problem with my ssh keys. Tomorrow, I should launch the “DeRosa era of zookeeping” by processing existing requests for additions to the blog list.

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The beginning of Plone muscle memory

Posted on January 14, 2009 by John| 1 Comment

I’m doing some theming work on my team’s first Plone-based site. It’s the first real (i.e., useful, concrete, for-my-job) Plone work I’ve done.

For the first time, just now, I knew how to find a viewlet’s linkages and guts. Without thinking, I went looking for the configure.zcml and common.py files… I’m starting to know what I’m doing!

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while listening_to(Plone): code(Plone)

Posted on January 10, 2009 by John| 2 Comments

Most of the technical people in my division (Fisher Interactive) use Apple Macs. They’re all MacBook Pros, except for a Mac Pro used by Andrew.

I sometimes listen to music via iTunes when I work. I’ve rediscovered classical music, so my library has some of that (e.g., a London Symphony performance of Holst’s The Planets, a Boston Symphony performance of Carmina Burana), and more contemporary favorites (e.g., Yes, Traffic, B-52s, Poco, Nektar, and Dave Mason). I shared out my iTunes library — I’m hoping that others bring in their favorite music, and we build a shared library network at work…

Anyway. On a whim, I bought the only two albums (For Beginner Piano and Plock) made by the group Plone, from which the Plone CMS got its name. I plugged in my Bose headphones, cranked up the volume, started the Plone playlist, and began on a CSS task.

I found Plone’s music to be… Different. It was like nothing I expected. It’s… Unusual.

Andrew says it’s good music to code to. Um… Maybe. I don’t think it’ll ever replace Yes, Traffic, or Lou Reed.

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Updated 1/10: I replaced the last sentence with one a little less impudent.

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