Lightning talks (Friday)
The lightning talks of the last day of the Plone Conference 2012. Again only three minutes each since we had 14 talks!
Paul J Stevens
Paul had a project where PDFs were workflowed to several sites using MultiSite. This meant there was lots of duplication. After migrating to Plone 4 and blob storage, there was still a lot of data.
He created a script (bscompress) for:
- De-duplication of blobs using hard-links
- Less disk-space, faster copy/move actions
In his case, the blob storage went from 14625 Megabytes to 2395 Megabytes.
Things still to do:
- Patch
ZODB/src/ZODB/blob.py. - Maintain compatibility and coordinate with other efforts (like collective.recipe.backup).
Philip Bauer
Dylan Jay talked about attracting more new people to get started in Plone. Dexterity and PloneIDE are great, but we need more. David Glick started to build a theme editor (plone.app.themeeditor). It uses jQuery UI and is a lot better than the Zope Management Interface (ZMI). There is going to be a PLIP about it.
Johannes Raggam
Johannes made a new release of plone.app.event. Please take note of the installation instructions. They include configuring the right time zone.
Johannes did a quick demo of the package. There are still issues, but it’s safe to call it a beta version.
Johannes thanks all the contributors for their work.
Mark: note that the package was moved from the Collective to the Plone organisation on GitHub on October 13th.
Elizabeth Leddy / Eric Steele
All the team leaders (security team, UI team, etc) went on stage so people would know who is who. And whom to talk to if you want to get involved.
Lukas Graf
His company (4teamwork) created ftw.tabbedview. It can be integrated with collective.js.extjs, collective.quickupload (if installed) and ftw.table.
The package ftw.tabbedview contains filtering, sorting, grouping,
managing columns, batching, flexible sources (catalog, SQLAlchemy,
…), data transformation (icon, authors, dates, …) and is highly
configurable. It can also be used on pretty much any context.
Philip Bauer
Philip helped to organise the Plone Konferenz München 2012. About 150 people attended and there were lots of new people. The goal of the conference was to attract decision makers. It was a very successful conference.
Tip: include a sprint lounge where people can sprint the whole conference. This way you can attract people that want to code and work together, but do not speak the language the conference is held in.
Such local conferences increase the visibility of the Plone community and can attract new members to join the community.
They were able to donate € 3000 to the Plone Foundation.
Mikko Ohtamaa
Solving problems in plone package at a time:
- visualtitle: To have a different title on your page and in your navigation.
- imageportlet: A new portlet type to show images.
- silvuple (That’s French…): Force the user interface to use your native language an show untranslated items.
- plomobile: A responsive design for Plone.
- sevabot: A Skype bot.
[Mark: The video of this lightning talk is definitely worth watching.]
Franco Pellegrini
If we have to believe the Mayan symbols, this year will be the end of the world. What better way to experience that day than by joining a sprint? So join the “End of the world” sprint in Ushuaia, Provincia de Tierra del Fuego, Argentina on December 21st, 2012.
Jukka Ojaniemi
Whiskers is a Pyramid application that collects all packages used in your buildouts. That is, if you use buildout.sendpickedversions. This way you can quickly see which buildouts use a certain version of a package. You might even be able to use this data to find out which eggs in your buildout cache are not used anymore.
Érico Andrei
A new solution to change how we collaborate: desk surfing. There is a Plone core developer dedicated desk in São Paulo. (You can also use it if you are not a core developer by the way.) If you are in São Paulo go there and contact Érico.
(Calvin Hendryx-Parker adds that you are also welcome in Fortville.)
Calvin Hendryx-Parker
Since Calvin missed is own presentation earlier that day, he did the three minute version of his talk “Playing With Blocks: 6 Pro Tips for Building Your Next Super-Charged Plone Site”:
- Use APIs instead of embedded iFrames.
- Criteria for evaluating your options:
- Mailing lists taken over by spam?
- Mailing list neglected?
- What is the activity in source control?
- Was there a corporate takeover?
- Hope
- Leverage Single Sign On (like OpenID).
- Supercharge your search with Solr (which can also index external content).
- Beware of over customisation.
- Testing, testing, testing.
The talk he would have held this morning will be recorded and put online.
Radek Jankiewicz
STX Next created a small addon for Plone: stxnext.grayscale. This package transforms content of a page to grey scale. It has been developed for Polish user requirements related to national mourning after a tragedy has occurred. Governmental sites and bank sites change their colour scheme to grey scale out of respect. The images are cached on file system and are thus not generated each request.
Johannes Raggam
A talk about amplify.cc, a prototype to replace PostNuke based community portals. It uses only one content type. They use Dexterity behaviours on content instances instead of on a class. Their conclusion is that having one content type for everything is possible and even works really nice.
Maurizio Delmonte
A lot of countries have their own localised Plone site, e.g. Italy, the Netherlands, Brazil, Spain, France and Poland. They all look different. But by using a bar at the top of the page which links to other Plone sites in the world, we can unite those sites and make it easier to discover them.