Plone Conference 2008 DC

­­­­­­Joel ­Burton thought it might be a nice idea to give you weekly updates about the Plone Conference 2008 Sprint up through the conference. And I’m not one to refuse a kindly request from Joel. Besides, there are many exciting things to tell you about. Such as:

Sprint Information Wiki

You can register a new sprint topic, or sign up for an already established topic on the official sprint information wiki. If you create a new topic, be prepared to lead it. That means you will need to solicit engagement from others, as well as give the morning briefing and evening report-out for your topic.

 ZopeSkel Sprint Report

Josh Johnson has been working overtime improving ZopeSkel. Why, just last week, I watched Josh crank out an entire Zope 3 powered content type for Plone without writing a single line of code or drawing a single UML box, using only ZopeSkel. Pretty cool. Here’s what Josh has to say this week about the upcoming ZopeSkel sprint after Plone Conference:

“Here’s a more concise summary of what I’m hoping to accomplish with the sprint:

ZopeSkel is a collection of paster templates for creating Zope/Plone projects. It handles the mundane boilerplate code that is necessary to get up and running.

ZopeSkel is great. It has become an indispensable tool in my plone utility belt, but it has some serious flaws:

• It’s spread across a wide range of use cases and situations
• It’s been developed by a large number of people(at least 20+ based on distinct usernames of committers) 3. It’s hard to test (recent work has been done in this area but it’s still not quite there)
• It’s poorly documented (or not at all in most cases)
• It’s not well known in the community

So my goal is to spruce up the bits of ZopeSkel that exist, document them, but more than anything publicize it so more people can get involved in it’s maintenance. We’ve already run into issues where a ZopeSkel template generates code that breaks with newer versions of plone. For ZopeSkel to be useful it has to keep up with changes in the projects it services.

Ultimately, I want a set of templates that are convenient to use, easy to test, and well documented. This will make them more useful and make plone/zope development much simpler, and we can do more to integrate ZopeSkel into other documentation.

So here’s the status of the sprint prep:

This week I identified some more bugs in ZopeSkel (specifically in the ‘archetype’ and ‘atschema’ commands), and I created an IRC channel, #zopeskel on irc.freenode.net. I’m ready to start discussing the outstanding issues and get down to deciding what parts of ZopeSkel need some work. I’m leaning toward the archetype and plone 3 related bits, but want to provide support for any other parts that people want to work on.

I plan to contact past contributors and interested parties sometime this week. - Josh”

Documentation Sprint Report

As a follow-up to her Plone Conference panel discussion with the Plone Documentation team, JoAnna Springsteen will lead the Plone Documentation sprint. JoAnna has been a leader among the Plone Documentation team for years. Here’s what Joanna has to report this week about the upcoming Documentation sprint after Plone Conference:

“So far we’ve started a task list on the Documentation Sprint Wiki.

Topics are open and we welcome people to add more. For those that don’t have a specific topic, but still want to participate, we will find you something to work on. As we get closer to the sprint, we will prioritize by what we need the most and ask that those topics be tackled first. We are going to try and have at least one doc team meeting (in #plone-docs) between now and the conference (watch the for details). At this meeting, I want to get the doc team section editors together so we can review our sections and see where we have needs for docs. Editors will add tasks to our to do list based on what their sections need[note to editors: perform gap analysis like that thing Matthew Wilkes did for his section]. Prior to the sprint, we ask that participants pick at least one task to document. We will help you find any background information you will need, before you get to the sprint. If it’s a particularly big topic, we encourage you to pair up or work in groups. For other sprints that are programming during this time, if you would like someone to document something, add it to our list if you know ahead of time.

One of our biggest goals for the sprint is to create a road map for the documentation team to follow. We encourage anyone and everyone to attend the documentation team panel during the conference and bring your ideas. We want ideas on how to manage our doc team and our doc set better. We’ll take these ideas and use them to make the documentation better and things on the team run more efficiently. This task will require group participation, both at the conference panel and during the sprint. JoAnna will take responsibility for writing up results and documenting things. This will probably take several rounds of revisions and continue after the sprint, but we intend to get a big chunk of it done during the sprint.

Yes, we do take beginners, non-programmers, new to plone people. Documentation is a great way to get involved in the Plone community, especially for those who don’t code (or who just don’t feel like coding).

Next week: We’ll have ideas on what you can do to help prepare for the sprint.

Why is this important? Why should you participate?

Because we want to make Plone.org the place to come for official Plone documentation. We want to ensure that our users always have an up to date and accurate knowledge base to rely on when they need information. By having great documentation, we can make Plone more user friendly and approachable. Documentation changes with every release and we want to make sure we keep up. We always need people to­ help write and edit docs, throughout the year. - JoAnna”

Sprin­t Location Report

The Arlington Career Center is the location for the Plone Conference 2008 Sprint. I went on a walk-through of the ACC this past weekend with our hosts, Jeff Elkner, David Welsh, Jason Straw, and Matt Gallagher. What I saw made me very excited. The ACC is a regular sponsor of sprints for one the very first Zope 3 applications, School Tool. The ACC team will not only be assisted us with finding our way around the ACC’s networking, but will also be sprinting themselves on School Tool.

Here’s just a sample of what I saw while at the ACC:

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…a beautiful atrium which itself can hold up to 100 sprinters seated before a laptop projection screen over a marble riser. There are several more classrooms reserved for us including rooms with projectors. There will be plenty of power drops provided by the ACC team. (But if you can, please bring a power strip.)

Getting to the ACC

I scouted out the way to the ACC to see if there would be any surprises. It takes about 55 minutes from the downtown DC area to get to the ACC, including buying a SmarTrip card and the short waits at stops. So plan to leave your hotel at 8am to get to the sprint on time. Space in the ACC is limited and on reserve for those who get there first!

First, I went from the Hotel Harrington to the Metro Center station at 12th and F Streets. I bought a SmarTrip card at the station, which saved me 40% on all my DC Metro fares. SmarTrip cards are available at Metro Center station. The DC Metro is a modern, fast, efficient, and clean electric transportation system. I boarded the Blue Line for Pentagon City station (not to be confused with plain old Pentagon Station). If you are staying around Dupont Circle, you can also take the Red Line towards Glenmont two stops, get off at Metro City station, and transfer on over to the Blue Line.

I took the Blue Line towards Franconia-Springfield. At least, that’s what the printed signs and map say. The electronic signs and voice announcements say toward Reagan National Airport, though, because beyond the airport, the Blue Line is shut down for track replacements. 15 minutes later, I’m seven stops down the Blue Line at Pentagon City station. From there you can catch any westbound Columbia Heights West - Pentagon City Line (16G, 16H, 16K, 16W) Metrobus down Columbia Pike almost all the way to the ACC. I had to cross the South Hayes Street to get the westbound stop because I came up the wrong escalator exit out of the Metro. When you get to the street level, just look for this Metrobus stop:

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Your SmarTrip card will also cover your Metrobus fare. Take the #16 about ten minutes up Columbia Pike to S. Walter Reed Drive. You’ll know you need to signal the bus to stop when you see the Arlington Cinema:

Once you get off the bus, turn right and head two blocks down S. Walter Reed until you see the ACC sign on the west side of the street at 816 S. Walter Reed Drive:

Keep walking around the building, through the driveway beside the library, and you will find the entrance to the ACC:

Until Next Time

I’m Chris Calloway and that’s our Sprintletter for this week. Stay tuned to the Plone Conference 2008 blog in the next week and the weeks to come about more sprint preparations, a Hotel Harrington first-hand report, and all about the gourmet Neopolitan food cart being arranged to cater the sprint.

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