littled.net

I’ve just come back from a week’s Plone 3 training in Oxford, run by Joel Burton. It was a hugely useful course for a number of reasons and Joel was an excellent and inspirational trainer, and most importantly knew when to pace the breaks!

It really helped to clear up some things I wasn’t that sure about and explain some concepts which I didn’t understand at all. The most useful things I found were:

• Getting an in-depth understanding of theming, including the processes you can go through to save yourself time and effort in the long run, i.e. “skinning” your site first (getting your portlets and viewlets in order) and then theming it (all the CSS stuff)
• Interfaces: although I’m still a little shaky on this, I think I understand them enough to start using them properly
• Productivity tools: we were shown some great productivity tools, like paster (and Joel’s web interface to paster) and ArgoUML / ArchGenXML. Who would have though you could create a content type in Archetypes just by drawing and not writing a line of code?
• Spending some more time on buildout
• Having a demonstration of new functionality in the interface for editors which shows why Plone 3 is good for users and well as us developers

It was great to meet others using Plone as well and interesting to see the different directions others are approaching Plone from. We had the more hard-core programmers, systems people, web developers and IT support staff who had to look after a Plone site as part of their other duties (that’s got to be fun). We’re starting to develop into a proper “community” now which is great as you get more of a sense of having a first-line support network. It also made me wish I were going to Washington, but little chance of that I fear!

Now I need to get using Plone 3 before I forget it all!