Plone Conference 2008 DC

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This week’s Plone Conference 2008 Sprint newsletter has practical advice about sprinting with more updates on the sprint topics, as well a first hand look at the hotel where most Plone Conference attendees will be staying. See the previous issues for more information if you have missed those. As always, you can post a sprint topic or express interest in an existing topic at the Plone Conference 2008 Sprint wiki. Once again, the Plone Conference 2008 Sprint takes places Saturday and Sunday, October 11-12, at the Arlington Career Center.

Beginners’ Sprint Update

Maybe the most exciting development for the Plone Conference 2008 Sprint is the Beginners’ Sprint. That’s where you, the Plone Community newcomer, receive special attention for how to get involved with the world’s top choice in open source enterprise CMS. Even if you aren’t a beginner, you can help with mentor new sprinters. A litle bird also told me that participants at this sprint will get a first look at some exciting follow-on sprint opportunities in the coming year. Here are the organizers, Joel and Jon. to tell you more:

“We’ll take a straightforward task–’How to add dynamic visual effects and better UI to PloneHelpCenter’ as our topic. This will help make the documentation faster, prettier, and more easily navigated. We’ll teach you KSS (a great skill for site builders and developers, and one that doesn’t require any JavaScript experience!). We’ll teach you how to work in teams (”pair programming”). We’ll teach you how to check in your changes to the ‘Collective.’ And we’ll teach you how to have fun while helping out our project with a critical task!

This is a sprint where you’ll WRITE REAL CODE that will really be used in the product–you can leave with a sense of having learned a useful skill in Plone, and contributed to a real product that will benefit our community.

Everyone is welcome, but we’re aiming to make sure this sprint is especially helpful for those who’ve never sprinted before (or those who have, and want to help mentor the new sprinters):

• Graphic designers and other people who can help us design the UI
• People who are interested in giving back but don’t know where to start
• People who don’t know how to use any kind of version control products to ‘check code in’
• People who want to learn about KSS and interface design
• People who know HTML and CSS but do not neccessarily know Python or Plone-specific technologies
• Everyone else that wants to help out, including experied Plone developers who want to help “mentor” new developers

Sprint Coordinators

• Joel Burton: Plone trainer, consultant, Plone Foundation Board Member
• Jon Stahl: Plone consultant, Plone Foundation Board Member, and organizer of the 2006 Seattle Conference

Our Recent Progress:

• Made agenda for sprint, including *teaching time* for sprinters to learn KSS
• Created list of improvements to the Help Center that we can accomplish in the two days of sprinting

Prerequisites

• You should bring a laptop with Plone 3.1 on it
• We’ll help you install “subversion”, the code tracking system used in Plone, *and* we’ll teach you to use it!”

-Joel and Jon

Effective Pairing: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Gerry Kirk is a remote project manager with Plone consulting firm ifPeople. Gerry’s experience is in working with software teams in South America from his home in Canada. Gerry is also a connoisseur of agile development who recently captured some interesting sprint dramatizations to video at the Agile 2008 Conference in Toronto. There is a lot to be learned from these enactments, especially for seasoned sprinters. Do yourself a favor. Remind yourself what sprinting is supposed to really be about by watching these insightful skits.

SchoolTool CanDo Sprint

Perhaps the oldest continuous Zope3 project and subject of more sprints than I can remember is the Arlington School System’s SchoolTool. In fact, SchoolTool has conducted so many sprints at the Arlington Career Center that it was a natural match for one of the SchoolTool team leads, Jeff Elkner, to get involved with hosting the Plone Conference 2008 Sprint. SchoolTool is a project to develop a common global school administration infrastructure that is freely available under an Open Source license and is quite advanced. At the Plone Conference 2008 Sprint, the SchoolTool team will be sprinting on the topic of CanDo, a student skills inventory integrated with SchoolTool.

Scrum in Five Minutes

At sprints, for most people the concentration is on sprinting. However, for topic leaders, the concentration can be at a metalevel above sprinting. Leading a sprint is definitely an acquired skill. If you are a sprint topic leader, whether first time or many times, consider giving Scrum in Five Minutes a look see. It’s a quick read which might provide a needed pause for reflection before your big weekend at the Plone Conference 2008 Sprint. And thanks to the WebRam team, Rob, Mark, and Josh, for turning me onto this useful tidbit. WebRam are the developers of BlitZEN (Bioinformatics, Laboratory Information Management, and IT Zen), the premier Plone-based Bioinformatics LIMS.

Repoze Sprint Announced

Without a doubt, one of the most vital Python technologies of recent vintage is repoze,the WSGI-fication of Zope into middleware. The goal: create the defacto ecosystem of web components capable of sharing between and integrating with the many silos of Python web frameworks. So it is with delighted anticipation when I see Chris McDonough has announced a repoze topic for the Plone Conference 2008 Sprint. Chrism and team will be sprinting on (the ingeniously named) repoze.lemoande (a “CMF replacement”), repoze.catalog (a “plone.app.catalog replacement”), and zc3.pt, a super sleek and fast reimplementation of Zope Page Templates and Genshi.

GloWorm at the Theme Sprint

Have you checked out GloWorm yet? If you haven’t, run, don’t walk, to pypi and do so. GloWorm is the mind-blowingly fantastic Plone page inspector you need, need, need. Alpha 6 is out now for your buildout pleasure. I was elated to learn from Eric Steele, the Penn State Weblion developer behind GloWorm, his invention will be a part of the Theme topic for the Plone Conference 2008 Sprint. Here’s what Eric has to say about it over at the WebLion blog:

“I’ll be spending time working on GloWorm at the Post-Conference Theming Sprint. I’m looking for a few folks interested in helping out. I’m especially interested in nabbing someone who knows their Javascript to work on a few tasks. Here’s my list of possible sprinting tasks:

• Drag-and-drop reordering of viewlets
• Viewlet manager overrides so I can get rid of the monkeypatch
• Writing some new KSS/Javascript to pull more information out of the page
• Browser compatability issues
• General UI primping and usability preening
• Brainstorming about what else it should do
• Documentation

Feel free to contact me at EricSteele att psu dott edu if you have any questions.” - Eric

The Hotel Harrington Experience

Staying at the Hotel Harrington for Plone Conference 2008? So am I. While in DC recently to discuss sprint plans with our Arlington Career Center host, Jeff Elkner, I stayed at the Hotel Harrington for three nights. I thought I’d give you an advance peek into “Washington’s Tourist Hotel.”

First of all, good choice. The Hotel Harrington is certainly basic. But its also a terrific value for its location steps away from Plone Conference 2008, the Metro Center station, and practically all DC points of interest. Built in 1914, the architecture might be best described as “Gothamite.” The rooms are small. The fixtures quaint. The elevators quirky. But it is made to order for Plone Conference, somewhere between an overgrown hostel with its “sleeps 12″ dorm rooms and a trip back in time to the days of grand old hotels.

What you will get: a bed, a window, a desk with chair, a lamp, a phone, a refrigerator, a microwave, a TV, free (but open) wireless, a closet, a bath, a lock on the door, and pretty decent ventilation. The clientele appears to be mostly international students spending a semester in DC. Parking is a subsidized $15/day in an underground garage four blocks away with unlimited pass in/outs. Check in is 4pm and check out is noon. There are no bell hops to tip. But then, there are no bell hops to stow your bags safely away in a lobby closet, either.

Speaking of the lobby, it opens into a small gift shop, where you can purchase postcards, commemorative plates, Advil, toothpaste, and Red Bull; a diner-style breakfast/lunch/dinner restaurant called “Harriet’s;” and a dive bar/restaurant called “Harry’s.” I mean dive bar in the good sense. Harry’s has inexpensive drinks of limited selection, a long bar, a few TVs tuned silently to major league sports, 80s glam metal on constant rotation, and about 100 seats for indoor dining and maybe as many for outdoor dining. The menu is very basic pub food, but much less expensive than many of the other dine-a-terias around the area. Harry’s also serves the room service for the hotel. No, this isn’t the same Harry’s Bar in Paris, Milan, and New York.

You will likely spend most of your time at Plone Conference 2008 soaking up the community and atmosphere of the conference rather than the decaying luxury of the Hotel Harrington. But you can certainly look forward to a good night’s sleep there each night of your stay. A Barnes and Noble bookstore is across the street (no Python-related books in stock, though). There are innumerable coffee shops, restaurants, and bars surrounding the Hotel Harrington. Location is everything.

Tip: print out this Hotel Harrington coupon and see if it works for you. Or, if driving into DC, pick up a copy of America Travel Coupons at most any truck stop on the way into the city.

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 Plone Conference 2008 Sprint preparations.

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