[triangle-zpug] Plone Jams
Chris Calloway
cbc at unc.edu
Thu Oct 25 22:46:20 CEST 2007
Mark and I talked offline about the follow-up to the last "Plone Tips"
TriZPUG meeting. The idea has been to put more "Z and P" in TriZPUG
meetings and take some of the fervent Plone activity, not out of
TriZPUG, but into additional TriZPUG meetings where newcomers wouldn't
be freaked out by the intensity of all the Plone activity. Not that we
couldn't talk about Plone at regular TriZPUG meetings anymore. But just
let some of the excess Plone pressure out of the cooker.
We'd dubbed this "Plone Jam" in previous attempt where I dropped the
ball on the meeting place for the designated day back in August, I
think. We're going to try it again.
The idea is sort of an "un-sprint." That is the topic is what you show
up with to work on rather than a pre-planned theme. And we may work on
our own things side by side for synergistic effect or we may work in
teams/pairs like sprint; it's up to the individuals how to work together
at each Jam. You can bring a problem you are trying to solve at work.
You can bring a pet project. You can bring something you are playing
around with. You can make a presentation. You can just work on your
code. It's a Jam: it's improvisational. Plone at the Improv. Just play
and see what comes out. See if a groove develops. Several TriZPUGers are
already grooving on their common approach to Plone integration and want
to share the love.
I'm coming into this with a sweet meeting space on the UNC campus: a
deluxe conference room with a huge picture window view on the 4th floor
of my new building. It has a giant screen laptop projector and a large
LCD display at either end. It has a gianormous conference table. It has
GigE pipes. It has nice restrooms. It has a kitchen with a frig and
sink. It's fairly private and secluded. The parking situation is the
same as when we meet in Phillips Hall (that is, Swain Lot for a modest
fee, around $1/hour). In fact, to get to this room you will enter
through Phillips Hall and walk through a sky bridge at the rear of the
building into brand new Chapman Hall (so new it's not even on campus
maps yet).
Mark suggested we meet every other week on days not overlapping regular
TriZPUG meetings. That sort of scares me except the CharPy group has
been having regular meetings every other week with no lack of steam. In
fact, meeting every other week seems to be energizing them.
In order to accommodate this, I have two requests for feedback:
1) The building this Jam would meet in locks at 7pm. Would you be
opposed to meeting at 6pm? Then anyone who is an hour or more late can
call me to be let in. If we jammed for two hours, this would also get us
out at 8pm for a bite to eat instead of when most places to eat have
already stopped serving.
2) TriZPUG used to meet on Wednesdays. We moved the meetings to Tuesdays
to accommodate a request from a regular member. This member has
indicated he would not be unopposed to now moving the night back to
Wednesdays. However, this is not what I'm asking. I'm asking if it would
be OK to have Plone Jams on the first and third Wednesdays of the month.
This is because a community organization to which I belong, and try to
get as many other people to join as possible, has their nationwide
designated meeting nights as Tuesdays. I'm just lucky that so far the
particular Tuesday of the month my local group of this organization
meets has not had a collision with TriZPUG meetings on fourth Tuesdays.
Is there opposition to having Plone Jams on first and third Wednesdays?
I will caution that any night we pick, there will be some home
basketball games during which parking on campus will be non-existent,
even if you get here early. Parking would then be best found in the Bank
of America deck on Rosemary Street. I think they charge $3 flat rate in
advance in the evening. Home games on first and third Wednesdays occur
on Dec 19 at 9pm, Jan 2 at 8pm, and Feb 2 and 9pm. That last date is the
Duke game.
If you can voice your concerns or agreements in short order, I can make
a repeating reservation for the room starting Wed. Nov 7 at 6pm.
Also, the next TriZPUG meeting will be on Nov 27 at 7pm in 328 Phillips
at UNC-CH. You are encouraged to speak up and tell us what you would
like to present. For my part, I would like to spend a little time
showing you why I've become a convert to KSS and update you on the
latest KSS developments. KSS is Kinetic Style Sheets. It brings a super
simple CSS-like domain-specific syntax to doing Ajax applications
without having to know any Javascript. Think of it as Grok for Ajax. It
currently works in Zope2, Zope3, Grok, and Plone. It's being brought to
Django and Pylons and soon the rest of the world. It currently works
with Prototype, MochiKit, Sarissa, and JQuery and has a plug-in
architecture to allow it to accommodate other Javascript libraries like
Scriptalicious. To learn more see http://kssproject.org/ (which is
undergoing re-org).
--
Sincerely,
Chris Calloway
http://www.seacoos.org
office: 332 Chapman Hall phone: (919) 962-4323
mail: Campus Box #3300, UNC-CH, Chapel Hill, NC 27599
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