Zope

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 ... [More] 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. [Less]

ZODB.org is having problems with git integration. We are temporarily moving to http://readthedocs.org to have documents built on commit. Please give us feedback!This is the first comprehensive documentation on the transaction package.ACID (atomicity ... [More] , consistency, isolation, durability) is a very convienent feature of ZODB. Along with transactions it makes programming ZODB an enjoyable experience for the Python programmer. All persistent ZODB operations are controlled by commit/abort using the transaction package. Carlos describes integration points including datamanagers, synchronizers, and commithooks -- all integration points to wire custom code into participating with transactions. One such integration is zope.sqlalchemy which provides coordination of transactions between ZODB and SQLAlchemy data sources.This chapter is longer than all three of the preceding chapters. It is the first comprehensive documentation on the transaction package. And it's the first chapter to use our favorite web framework Pyramid to demonstrate usage in a web context. Remember the transaction package does not depend on the ZODB. Spread the word. [Less]

Produce & Publish Authoring Environment 2.0 needs a better management for links to anchors in Plone 4.

Today we are rolling out a brand new header and navigation bar for  Plone.org, a system allowing event banners to be easily updated, and a standalone development server where new additions to Plone.org can be tested and approved before moving to the ... [More] production servers.The new header and navigation bar was implemented by Chrissy Wainwright of Indiana-based Six Feet Up.  In addition to better branding for the site, the new toolbar facilitates some upcoming changes to site navigation, gets rid of an issue with the names of logged-in users overwriting navigation links, and generally provides some cleanup to the top of the plone.org pages.The new events banner system was implemented by David Glick of Seattle's Groundwire.  This system will allow the communications team to rapidly switch out the event banners on the front page of plone.org, helping keep it current and relevant.  Utilizing the Carousel banner system developed by Groundwire, the new banners offer control and customization we've long needed.The new development server for plone.org was set up by Myroslav Opyr of Quintagroup, located in Lviv, Ukraine.  Its creation means developers can test out additions and updates to plone.org in an environment as close as possible to the actual server, but without compromising the security, accessibility or stablility of the actual site. Each of these individuals' companies will receive one month of visibility on the front page of plone.org as a thank you for their work in the form of a company logo linked to their website.One of the goals of this program from its conception was that it would promote collaboration and involvement across the community - and the results have been outstanding.  Not only are real, visible changes taking place, the folks handing the bounties have engaged collaborators to get things done. The new theme changes included design work by Iain Claridge of Netsight and Mark Corum of the University of Virginia; the implementation of the development server was helped by the efforts of Alex Clark of ACLARK.NET, LLC and the folks at Six Feet Up, among many others."Bounty Missions offer a great way to contribute to the success of Plone while getting some visibility. Hopefully this first round of work will encourage more contributions from other Plone supporters", stated Six Feet Up CEO Gabrielle Hendryx-Parker. You can find out more about the Bounty program, and how you can get involved by visiting the program overview page. [Less]

Wow, haven't posted an entry for a long time. Here's a recap: twitter kept me from blogging much zope stuff is slowing down, probably will have to move to some java web dev, or none at all for work still a pythonista, any chance I got; looking at webweofije...

Plone 3 release manager Alan Hooey will be tagging the important test-related issues which are holding up the release of 3.3.6 so that those in the tuneup can work on resolving them.  Plone Tune-Ups are regularly-scheduled one-day mini-sprints where ... [More] members of the Plone Community from around the globe come together online to grab some outstanding tickets from the Plone Trac system and help move Plone forward.Tune-Ups offer an excellent environment for new developers to get started with Plone development and understand the process used by the community for identifying, tracking, and resolving issues with Plone. Development experts from the community are available online during these events to provide help and answer questions. Tune-Ups also offer structured time where established developers can spend a couple of hours picking out and resolving important tickets. Tickets for each Tune-Up are tagged as to level of difficulty and relative time needed to resolve them, making choosing the right tickets to work on a straightforward process.As of April 15th, Plone Tune-Ups will be moving to a monthly schedule to simplify planning for those who want to be involved.  Future Tune-Ups will be held on the second Friday of each month.The Tune-Up format and events were the brainchild of Plone development and hosting company Six Feet Up, and April 15th marks the 44rd Tune-Up since the first event was held in 2009.  Tune-Ups have been responsible for closing over 300 tickets in that time.You can find out all about Plone Tune-Ups by visiting the Plone Tune-Up Network, which will provide all the information you need to get started with this important work. [Less]

The next version of Plone, 4.2 will be released on September 1, 2011.  In order to make this date reachable, a freeze of new features will take two months earlier - on June 30th.  No more PLone Improvement Proposals (PLIPS) will be accepted for 4.2 ... [More] unless they have been completed and reviewed by that date - PLIPS recieved July 1 to December 31, 2011 will instead be considered from the 4.3 release - due on March 1, 2012.  Future releases will be on the same 6 month timeline. Calvin Hendryx-Parker, Plone Foundation president, remarked that "I am excited about the Framework Team's initiative to get Plone releases out in such a timely fashion. Setting the community's expectations for releases will help better coordinate resources needed to move the project forward and no one will have to be left guessing when an update will be forthcoming." The details of the new PLIP process can be found here.PLIPS are the official method by which new features and modifications to Plone are submitted to the Framework Team for consideration. PLIPS can be submitted at any time, and the framework team will meet every 2 weeks and comment on any new PLIPs that have been submitted or updated. This change facilitates a faster release cycle while also guaranteeing feedback on any changes in less than 2 weeks.  You can find out more about the overall release process by visiting the Release Process page.  For more information on submitting a PLIP, see PLIP Instructions. [Less]

Last day! We had to get out of our sprint location at 13:00 so we didn't get too much done late last evening and this morning. But still: Found one specific hard-to-solve problem in the installer that hopefully won't occur all that ... [More] often. (System-wide installed python packages that we need sometimes result in other system-wide installed packages also ending up on python's load path even though a different buildout-managed version ought to be used...) Fixed one of the most important scripts to run with the newer version of networkx (a network/graph analysis library). One part of the code needed 1.2, another version 0.99. Now everything runs happily on 1.2. Worked a bit more on the big run-everything test. Company-internal sprinting This is the first time I had a company-internal sprint. I've attended 6 or 7 python/plone/grok/django sprints, so community sprints with people from different countries and companies. Now it was a sprint with three colleagues. What do I think of it? It is great for getting to know your colleagues better. You'll always remember the sprint when you see them in the office. You've seen each other full-time for five days. Cooked for each other, walked in the park together, stayed up till late at night together. I enjoyed it. You get to know the code. You work on the same code for five days: you know your way around reasonably well after that. Everyone cooks well. Working together towards a single goal, on the same code, for a full week is loads of fun. You get a good team spirit by working together in this way! No interruptions! At the office, people stop by and ask things. Sites blow up and need fixing. When you're in a small town in the countryside in an unmarked house, you're harder to find than when you're sitting behind your desk :-) The house was big enough so that everyone was far enough from my room that I didn't get a single complaint about my snoring. So: company-internal sprints are a good idea! The house we hired (de kleine weide, B&B Dorpsstraat in Renswoude) was quite good. The number one necessity: good internet connectivity. We had better wireless than at the office :-) Quiet. Nice surroundings for a short after-lunch walk. Couple of tables for putting your laptop on. Kitchen. Only drawback: the pool table and the ping pong table in the garage were of questionable state of repair (but that's no life necessity). And exactly the week we were there, they were renovating the supermarket in town so we had to drive over to the next town for loot :-) At 13:00 we knocked off for the day. Beautiful weather, so I hit the bicycle paths again. 95 km (see map for the first 65 km before my iphone battery gave out). Good ending to a good week. [Less]

Each year, Google's Summer of Code program funds university students around the world with stipends of $5000US to spend 12 weeks working on advancing open source projects.  With news of Plone acceptance, we're accepting applications from students ... [More] interested in being involved, as well as mentors to help oversee their work. You can see a list of some of the ideas which have been put out there for student projects on the Plone Summer of Code Ideas Page. Leading Plone's GSoC effort this year is Kevin Kalupson, a long time Plone community member and technologist who traces his programming roots back to the Apple II.  Kevin was the first full-time employee of Penn State's Weblion group and has been involved with Plone since version 2.0 when he got a PloneLive CD that was given out at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.  Kevin takes on the leadership role handled admirably until this year by Matthew Wilkes, and its a role he isn't taking lightly.  His goal for this year?  Successfully doing up to 8 projects which will improve Plone and help encourage students interested in becoming active participants in the Plone community.According to Kevin,  "Each interested student has to make a proposal to sell us on the idea of how they would attack an idea, the resources they would use and what they would do for us.  Students can get their ideas from those the community puts out there - or they can also come up with their own ideas and submit them to us themselves."The bottom line? "Its something they can do in 12 weeks instead of washing dishes for the summer that will give them real experience creating something that's tangible. I also imagine that if you can put Google on your resume at age 22, that is something that will help you stand out in the crowd when you are looking for a job."The Plone community has participated in GSoC for the last several years - including four successful projects completed by students who were involved last summer.  Now that Plone has been selected, the real process begins - identifying projects, mentors and students interested in taking on projects. Kevin is particularly interested in getting the right mentors for the program. Mentoring a GSoC project isn't just about reading an email now and then - its about helping provide resources to students, providing some handholding to get started - and mentoring and teaching is definitely involved.  He encourages anyone interested in being a mentor to contact him.Students interested in applying can find out more on the GSOC website or getting feedback on their ideas on Plone mailing lists and IRC at #plone.  The deadline for applications is April 8th - so students are encouraged to submit theirs well in advance of that date. [Less]