October 26 - November 1
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Pre-Conference Training

The conference is offering high-value, low-cost courses in the two days directly before the conference. Come and learn from Plone's experts about our features and best practices.

Plone has a strong tradition of ensuring that quality, affordable training is available to our community. In that spirit, we're pleased to announce our pre-conference trainings

These trainings are offered in the same location as the conference, and are being held October 26-27, 2009.

Getting Started With Plone

This course will take you from the installation of Plone through the creation of a functional, useful Plone site. We'll explore setup on different platforms, configuration of built-in options for common use cases, and how to add functionality from Plone's great library of add ons. If you're new to Plone, evaluating us a product, or interested in the best hidden gems in our add-on products, this course is for you.

This course covers:

  • Proper installation of Plone, along with advice on security that setup
  • Configuration choices for common sites (internets, intranets, etc)
  • Installing add-on products
  • Recommended add-on products

About the Trainer

Steve McMahon is one of Plone's most respected experts, particularly in the area of add-on products. As the maintainer of PloneFormGen, Steve understands the needs of site integrators and users, and how to design and document products that meet those needs. He is a principal in Reid-McMahon. Steve serves on the Plone Foundation Board of Directors in the capacity as secretary. Steve lives in Davis, California, USA.

Course Details

Plone 3 Theming: Best Practices

This course covers the knowledge you need to effectively theme your Plone 3-based Plone site. If you're new to Plone, or if you'rean experienced Plone developer/designer looking for the best practices for an excellent Plone theme or theme product, this course is for you.

It is intended for:

  • web designers
  • site integrators
  • developers


We'll be covering:

  • making changes easily through-the-web
  • moving, hiding and creating viewlets
  • creating new portlets
  • tips and tricks for CSS and design in Plone
  • theming "subsites" within a Plone site
  • making your theme "future-proof" against future versions of Plone
  • best-of-breed add-on products for Plone theming
  • "productizing" through-the-web changes into an on-disk theme product


Prerequisites:

  • Experience with HTML and CSS

About the Trainer:

Joel Burton is a professional Plone trainer and consultant. Since 2002, Joel has been designing and deploying Plone sites, including some of the largest and most sophisticated in the world. His Plone training, including the classic "Plone Bootcamp", is offered around the world, and has been called "practically essential". Joel served on the board of the Plone Foundation three times, twice in the capacity as President and Board Chair. Joel lives in San Francisco, USA.

Course Details

Best practices for Deploying and Optimizing Plone sites

This course will teach you best practices for deploying and optimizing your Plone sites. You will learn how to:

  • manage your code with a version control system (subversion)
  • release eggs to pypi, plone.org and private egg server
  • create buildout configurations for local development and production deployment
  • pin the eggs versions in your buildout
  • write and run unit tests and functional tests on your entire Plone application
  • deploy your buildout to a production server (we will use a virtual machine for this)
  • install all operating system dependencies on destination Linux server
  • configure Varnish and CacheFu for caching (troubleshoot with LiveHTTPHeaders)
  • configure Pound and Zeo clusters for load balancing
  • create Apache vhosts
  • configure cron job to pack the ZODB
  • configure cron job for repozo to make backups of Data.fs
  • configure log file rotation

Advanced topics if there is time:

  • setting up a buildbot server for continuous integration
  • load testing using Funkload
  • alternative http servers such as nginx
  • track issues/tickets with Trac

About the Trainer:

Nate Aune is the principal behind Jazkarta, one of Plone's most respected consulting and development firms. He is also the lead developer behind the suite of products known as Plone4Artists, providing multimedia tools and social media resources in the Plone world. Nate is currently serving his third term on the Plone Foundation Board. Nate lives in Boston, Massachusetts, USA.

Course Details

Python 101

Python is the secret weapon of Plone. We're a fully-featured, easy-to-use CMS that just happens to have the greatest language in the world as our scripting an development language. In this course, you'll learn to take advantage of Python! We'll cover the basics of Python, including the common idioms of the language.

What This Course Covers:

  • How to interact with Python
  • All about objects
  • Python's built-in types
  • How to control your Python program
  • Functions, modules, packages, and the standard library
  • Exception handling
  • Classes
  • Decorators, generators, descriptors, and properties
  • Input and output handling

About the Trainer:

Chris Calloway is an Applications Analyst with the University of North Carolina Department of Marine Sciences. Chris is a facilitator for TriZPUG, one of the world's largest and most-successful Python/Zope/Plone user groups. Chris teaches Python in his famous "PyCamps", a low-cost, high-value way to get up to speed with Python. Chris organized the 2008 Plone Conference Sprints. Chris lives in Carrboro, North Carolina, USA.

Course Details:

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