News

Six Feet Up's Senior Template Developer Chrissy Wainwright is offering a two-day in-depth training on how to style websites powered by the open source content management system Plone as part of the upcoming Plone Symposium East 2011. The session will cover the various methodologies available, including Diazo/XDV, and will be held immediately before the conference on the campus of Penn State University May 17-18th.

Six Feet Up is pleased to announce half of the seats available for Chrissy's training have already been filled, assuring that the class will go on as scheduled. Template developers interested in participating are encouraged to sign up soon as there is limited capacity.

Some of the attendees currently registered are coming from:

• Arizona State University
• Penn State University
• North Carolina Department of Public Instruction
• UCLA

We've asked people who have already signed up for the class a few of questions, and think what we heard from them might provide food for thought for people who have yet to sign up:

What do you hope to learn from this training?

• Things NOT to do that we may have been doing on Plone 3 theming
• How to use DIAZO -- would be great to avoid having to use paster to create a theme
• Rational use of portlets and viewlets (sometimes a portlet just does weird things)
• Implementation and real world experience of Plone 4
• How to create a theme product so that it can be easily transferred and used from one site to another through a buildout installation. At the moment, I am only using CSS to theme a site.
• Understanding viewlets and TAL
• Creating new eggs and products with paster

How will you be using the knowledge gained from this training?

• Creating themes for Plone 3 and 4
• Modifying existing Plone 3 and 4 themes
• Migrating themes to Plone 4
• Theming with Diazo/XDV (no clue what this is at the moment)

Is there a certain topic (viewlets, TAL) that you are looking forward to the most?

• TAL is straightforward -- but knowing how to use the plone API is not
• Examples of using catalog searches, branes, and methods creating new folder layouts. Have more of a 'collage' for views on folderish type of objects.

You can find out more about the class and sign up by visiting the Theming Plone 4 Training page.