Plone Bootcamp

I'm sitting in Joel Burton's Theming Sites with Plone 3 Bootcamp ahead of the 2008 World Plone Conference. Looks to be a good thing targeted for my needs, moving from 2.5 to 3.1.

First thing this morning as I was wandering more or less lost, jetlagged and tired through the Ronald Reagan Center a pleasant fellow in a Plone t-shirt asked if he could help me find someplace. I said, "Oceanic B" and he introduced himself as Joel and directed me to the nearby classroom. An auspicious start. At left, Joel discusses working with TAL, one of those things that I can do, but not particularly well.

For the morning, there has been a healthy amount of review, but also the beginnings of the 3.1 way of doing things. There have been a few cool tricks, too. Using http://127.0.0.1 in one tab and http://localhost in another let's me be logged on as site manager in one tab and be an anonymous user in another. No more Firefox for admin and IE for a test user.

The new style portal_view_customizations is also a key concept. The portal_view_customizations defaults to the Registration view and customized items are highlighted in yellow. The non-obvious need to explicitly click on the Contents tab before deleting a totally hozed object is a good tip to remember. Additionally, the use of portal_types to specify alternative templates was a good piece of information--even for us dinosaurs running 2.5 sites.

Caught a glimpse of Limi in the hallway. In a brief 10-second exchange he reports that San Fran is good (doesn't miss all the snow in Norway) but that he needs to work on the balance between Google and Plone.

More tomorrow regarding the second day of class and then on to the Conference proper on Wednesday.