Plone Symposium East 2008

Plone Symposium East 2008 is planned for March 12 and 13 at Penn State University in scenic State College, PA. Training sessions will be held March 10 and 11 and sprints will run throughout the week.

As an official sponsor of this event, Six Feet Up will present two discussions at the first event since Plone 3.0's release with Six Feet Up staff nearly filling the entire day on Wednesday March 12. Director of Engineering Calvin Hendryx-Parker will lead two panel discussions: "Plone Strategic Planning & Plone Foundation Update" and "So You Want to be a Plone Consultant?" and present "Plone's Anatomy." Senior Developer Clayton Parker will present "Getting Plone Ready for the Prom" and Deployment Expert Andrew Parker will present "Cross-Training for Your Plone Deployment" along with Calvin Hendryx-Parker. Kurt Bendl will present a case study on "University of Louisville's Plone Deployment and Support Structure."

In the opening panel, Calvin and other leaders from the Plone community will discuss the results of the Strategic Planning Summit, updates on the current  work of the Plone Foundation, and the future directions of Plone. The lunch panel promises to be an eye-opener revealing what it really takes to make it as an open source consultant. Calvin will also present "Plone's Anatomy" which answer all your developer questions and discuss how all the pieces of the software stack interact with one another.

"Getting Plone Ready for the Prom" will include a review of the various philosophies to reskinning Plone, augmenting the site layout via viewlets, when to use Zope 3 resources, information about registering your customizations with the resource registries, and how to use base properties to create your site's very special look.

"Cross-Training for Your Plone Deployment" will feature using a live benchmark approach to reveal the secrets of reaching peak performance by going through a series of steps to configure your software and hardware. Proving that small changes have big effects a live demo will show a race between two setups: Plone with just Zope on the front-end versus Plone with a ZEO Cluster, Nginx and Squid.

Kurt Bendl, formerly of the University of Louisville, will present a case study on how UofL supports a large Plone infrastructure. UofL has nearly 200 departments using Plone already and the case study will detail  the processes, products and hardware involved. Existing problems and plans for the future will also be discussed.

If you are planning on attending the Plone Symposium and would like to meet with Six Feet Up, please email info@sixfeetup.com so we can be sure to see you in person!