Blog

I'm Jim, one of the newest Sixies here at Six Feet Up. This past week, I got the opportunity to attend IndyPy. I'm a recent transplant to Indiana coming here from Florida. Since joining Six Feet Up, this has been the first community activity with a Python group that I've been able to attend. Six Feet Up employees have been actively participating in local, regional, international, and even online open source events often focusing around Python and Plone. I was glad to attend this event and was excited to find out many of the other members of Six Feet Up would also be attending. Kurt, who is also new at Six Feet Up, also joined me, meeting new faces and hearing about new Python tips and tricks...

For the first break-out session of the day, I attended Gregory Angle's talk on Page Templates. Greg works for PSU in the research department. He showed us a few specific pages on their website and talked about the customized templates he created to achieve the desired functionality. Along with each of the main examples, he also showed us the code used to make it work...

I had the privilege of leading a two-day training at Plone Symposium East 2010. I taught a group of five people how to customize the front-end design of a Plone site from start to finish...

"Plone 3 Theming" was published in July 2009 by Veda Williams, a Plone developer for Groundwire. This book is full of all the information a developer would need to create a theme and apply it to a Plone site. Veda Williams does a great job of covering every area related to theming and mentioning additional products that developers may not already be aware of. This includes Chapter 2, which contains information helpful to all web developers, not just those using Plone. Throughout the book, Veda outlines best practices for theming, and I was happy to see that we at Six Feet Up use nearly all the same methods...

Plone 4 is about to be released and only a few products have been tested from a compatibility standpoint...

One of the talks that I found very interesting was "A Dexterity Intro for Recovering Archetypes Addicts", by David Glick. You can find the slides and recording of the presentation on the Weblion site...

I had the pleasure of meeting Elizabeth Leddy for the first time at the Plone Symposium East conference in Penn State. I also got to sit through her talk about "Unloading Plone: Tools, Tips and Techniques for Approaching Scalability in Plone Systems" and learned quite a few things. You can find the slides and recording of the presentation on the Weblion site...

A strong Content Management System must be accessible to as many people as possible. One of the areas that doesn't get much attention is that the CMS you choose must be easy to use. If it isn't, why bother to have one? A good CMS will not stand in your way of producing great content for the site; it will not complicate the process, only improve it. After all, the content is who you are, and you won't want to fight the tool to get things done...

Six Feet Up team members Calvin Hendryx-Parker, Clayton Parker and David Blewett traveled to Ohio State University in Columbus for the 3rd PyOhio conference last weekend. This year's event continued the momentum from earlier conferences. Python users from the Midwest gathered to learn new strategies, maximize Python capabilities and wrap up with two days of development sprints. The location of the event was a great choice, making use of OSU's excellent Ohio Union...