Theming Plone 3, Day 2

Just finished Joel Burton's excellent intensive two-day mini-course on Theming Plone 3. Good stuff. Learned tons about many, many intricacies of 3.1. This is critical as we need to upgrade our many existing 2.5 sites and start implementing new portals with the most recent technology.

Leslie Molecke from the City of Albuquerque web portal team had recommended Joel's bootcamps. They took his training last year and it was extremely helpful. Take a look at http://www.cabq.gov/albuquerquegreen for some of their handiwork.

Having been through a mini-bootcamp now, I can recommend it (or better still, the full-length version) to anyone working in Plone. Even dyed-in-the-wool Pythonistas are guaranteed to learn
something about the way Plone skins and themes its pages. Seems like every hour, even if the topic was elementary CSS, I learned several useful tidbits. Worth every penny, assuming that pennies have any worth after this week's market crashes.

Meanwhile, its 7:30 EDT here at the hotel and I'm taking a break from grading papers for Database Design. Too bad the Pentagon City Marriott is so far from the Plone Conference social evening up at the Science Hall near Dupont Circle. Have to miss this one.

Tomorrow the 2008 Conference begins and it looks to be full of great talks and tutorials. I'll be looking for Nate Aune and Mark Corum to discuss Plone marketing, statistics, metrics, and advocacy.

Nate sent me a fairly recent link I'd missed -- http://www.waterandstone.com/resources.html as well as pointers to a couple of his pages -- http://www.openplans.org/projects/plone-marketing/metrics-and-statistics and http://www.openplans.org/projects/plone-marketing/metrics. More on these as I have time to digest them.

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.