The deadline for presentation proposals for the Plone Symposium East is  end-of-day, Monday, March 22. Yup, next Monday. For your effort and good humor, we'll give you a $75 break on early-bird registration fees - oh yes! In fact, if you wear a kilt, we'll consider (briefly) giving you an additional $5 off. The proposal form is linked to our main Symposium page: http://bit.ly/4qYtIC.

If 50 minutes of slides is stretching your resources too much, there's always lightning talks. Just remember this: everyone wants to know what you do with all your free time.

The training sessions have been selected. Great 3, 2, and 1 day sessions by a select few Plone and Zope all-stars, including Chris Calloway on Python, Steve McMahon on JavaScript in Plone, Chrissy Wainwright on Theming Plone, Tres Seaver on implementing the WSGI standard, Nate Aune on theming with Deliverance and xdv, Alex Clark on Plone site administration, and Joel Burton on professional Plone development. An amazing lineup of training sessions. Attendees will be registering directly with the trainers. The main symposium page has links to the trainers' sites: http://bit.ly/4qYtIC.

And while you're at the Symposium main page, be sure to check out the sprints. So far, there's a growing number of proposals to appeal to the full range of Plone wildlife: hard core developers, content authors, and marketers.

And if you're family is asking "Well, what are we going to do?", them 'em Rebecca is compiling maps and info about bike and hike trails, factory outlets, restaurants and other refined amusements. You'll find maps and tips linked from our Symposium main page in a few days.

We're looking forward to seeing you in Happy Valley, PA.

Hello,

Most of time in plone we do the work during the transaction. Or some task could be defered after it and better in an another client. collective.indexing do that for catalog indexing.
There is a simple solution to do that with Products.CMFSquidTool wich implements all hard work of assynchrone task.

So first import this:

from Products.CMFSquidTool.queue import Queue
from Products.CMFSquidTool.utils import pruneAsync


And add a new class that send http url after the transaction

class CallAsynchronous(Queue):
    """
    Sends requests on transaction commit
    """

    def _finish(self):
        # Process any pending url invalidations. This should *never*
        # fail.
        for url in self.urls():
           ## you can change this to post
            pruneAsync(url, purge_type='GET')
        # Empty urls queue for this thread
        self._reset()

    def queue(self, url_view):
            self.append(url_view)

call_utility = CallAsynchronous()

You add an instance in your code at the start of zope wich
And now in your code you can call assynchronous task like this

call_utility.queue('http://myzeoclient:8080/myplone/myview')


So at the end of the transaction url are called . You can by this method delegate some heavy operation to other zeoclient. That’s all !! easy no ?

Regards Youenn.

Well, we have about seven months until the Plone Conference rocks up in Bristol in October, and we've been busy securing the venue.

I am now proud to announce the Plone Conference 2010 will be held at the 4* Thistle Grand Hotel in central Bristol.

The hotel is located in the central old part of Bristol City, with its cobbled streets and old buildings. We have four rooms booked in the hotel for the main conference, the largest holding 400 people, the others holding around 90 people each. The hotel also can offer us around 60 rooms for delegates to stay in during the conference, and there is a wide number of other hotels of various costs, serviced apartments and youth hostels in walking distance.

There is also plenty of social life around with a large number of restaurants, bars and clubs within a few minutes walk. All delegates will also have passes to the hotel's leisure centre as well.

But beyond all that, this hotel actually has quite a nice historical connection with what we are doing -- a connection I only discovered when searching for photos for this blog post.

Our main aim with the work we do with Plone and on the internet in general mostly revolves around communication. We allow others to communicate information better. Whether that be by designing public facing websites, private corporate intranets, or group collaboration spaces... we enable communication.

The Thistle Grand stands on the site of a previous important link in the world of communication -- the mail. Before the Grand Hotel there stood the White Hart and White Lion Inns. Looking at the lithograph above and the modern photo at the top you can see the same church tower behind the site of the venue. The White Lion Inn can be traced back to 1606 as an Inn and went on to become a very important part of the Kings Post:

"The White Lion, Bristol, was one of the most 
famous coaching houses in England, east, west, 
north, or south. It stood in Broad Street, a 
thoroughfare which belied its name as regards 
breadth, and could only be considered broad by 
comparison with the even narrower Small Street, 
which ran parallel with it. Yet at one time 
there were as many coaches passing in and out 
of Broad Street as any street in Bristol, or 
even in London!"

This excerpt it taken from a book originally published in 1905 entitled "The King's Post -- Being a volume of historical facts relating to the Posts, Mail Coaches, Coach Roads, and Railway Mail Services of and connected with the Ancient City of Bristol from 1580 to the present time." published online by Project Gutenberg.

Back then, with no telegraph or telephone (or even internet!) Bristol used to even have its own time, being 2 degrees 30 minutes west of London it was approx 10 minutes behind London on time, evidence of which can still be seen on the clock above the Corn Exchange in the centre which has two minute hands, one for London and one for Bristol:

With the advent of the railway, and Bristol's famous son, Isambard Kingdom Brunel who build the Great Western Railway, Bristol Time was subsequently abolished and Railway Time adopted in 1852.

Anyway, that is the history lesson over. The main thing to be excited about is we have a venue :)

We are now currently selecting a venue for the conference dinner/party and our shortlist includes a former railway terminus (the world's earliest surviving purpose built railway terminus), an art gallery, a victorian bank, and an arts and media centre. We just need to work out which one will work out best for us!

As for talks, training and all that... We'll be putting a call out for training proposals and talk submissions once Plone Symposium East and European Plone Symposium are out of the way. We will be opening booking for the event in June.

-Matt

The Google Summer of Code will be happening again this year, and I am going to propose a project under the PSF : Distutils2.

If you are a student and you are interested in building with me the replacer of Distutils, this is an opportunity to contribute to an Open Source project !

A finite and detailed list of tasks will be defined just before the proposals deadline, to avoid proposing a project that is too vague or to make it impossible to rate the student at mid-term. This list will be built at the last moment, because I am unable right now to know exactly what will be the state of Distutils2 this summer.

But here’s a taste of what the student will work on:

• work on the implementation of PEP 376
• finish the implementation of the static metadata (that is the “no more setup.py” subproject )
• work on a “configure” command that will generate a configuration file other commands can read back and use.
• write a tutorial on how to use Distutils2
• promote and evangelize Distutils2 – This will consist of helping python project to switch/adopt Distutils2. We will define a list of targets and the student will be in charge of helping them switching to Distutils2 if they want.

If you are interested, be sure to join the mailing list and stay tuned !

After the Confoo.ca conference, Yannick Gingras from the Montreal Python user group organized two

Sprinting on TurboGears 2

small sprints at the Brasseurs Numériques headquarters (Digital Brewers). Yannick’s company is called like that because he brews his own beers ! As a matter of fact, he prepared a beer for the sprints, that was really good (and quite strong.). His beer would probably beat some good Belgium beers on a blind test.

Sprint #1 : Turbogears

Chris Perkins led a Turbogears sprint Saturday. I am not very familiar with this framework but I am using Pylons a lot, and its the basis of Turbogears. Alice Bevan-McGregor was present, and could confront his ideas on web frameworkery with Chris since he created his own tool : WebCore. I’ve heard that they worked on making the Turbogears dispatcher a standalone library so it could be used by both frameworks.

I worked on my side on small packaging issues TG has. We fixed the latest TG 2.x beta custom package index that was broken (it was generating incomprehensible errors when installing TG, and I found out that the index pages in the TG PyPI were broken)

Next,  I’ve added to easy_install a –no-find-links option to prevent links added by projects in their setup.cfg. This will prevent projects like Pylons to implicitely add links that easy_install reads. The effect is that some old version of some packages like nose were installed. This is not released yet.

If you were present to the sprint, please comment to tell us what you’ve done !

EDIT: Chris added more details on the TG sprint — see the comments

Sprint #2 : Packaging

Monday evening we worked on packaging issues. I started the sprint by presenting the current state of packaging on a board. That took quite a while because it is not obvious to understand the packaging eco-system (distutils, setuptools, distutils2 and pip.).

Then I’ve listed possible tasks and people started to work.

• Yannick Gingras worked a bit on the Hitchicker’s Guide to Packaging then worked on Distribute on Issue #133.
• Ahmed Al-Saadi was pretty new to packaging so he worked on the guide and tried to catch up with the state of packaging (that’s a real work )
• Alexandre Vassaloti worked on porting distutils2 into Python3. So basically, like Distribute, Distutils2 will be installable on Python 2 and 3, using the same source tree, and a 2to3 call upon installation.
• Nicolas Cadou worked on PEP 345 support. He created a sample project that will be used in a functional test to validate that everything works. He eventually fixed some code in Distutils2 so it works with the PEP 345 DistributionMetadata class I’ve built during Pycon. I need to merge his work asap.
• Matthieu Leduc-Hammel worked with me on PEP 345 support for PyPI. I’ve changed the postgres database to add the new fields, and Matthieu worked on PyPI UI. For instance, you will have a nice box on the project pages now that displays links from the Project-URL metadata field. I need to merge his work asap.

As a global note: Mercurial was the perfect tool for this sprint. I am able to merge people work in Distutils2 and other projects without all the repository access issues we usually get when we start a sprint. I am looking forward for a full Mercurial switch of Python, because this will boost contributions.

Thanks Yannick, Nicolas for the Sprint and the Beer ! Thanks Ubity for sponsoring the Packaging sprint with pizzas ! (they are looking for developers btw)

I’ve been working remotely for the past 6 years now. I can’t believe it has been so long already.

Quick explanation. I’ve started to work remotely for good reasons : I have a 7 years old kid that lives with his mother in Dijon, France. Since I am not with her anymore, I need to stick around Dijon in order to see my boy as often as possible. Until he’s old enough to visit me elsewhere by himself

6 years earlier, working remotely was not really possible in France. Companies were reluctant to do it because they thought they were unable to control their employees if they were not physically present.

But in the software industry, a well-organized company has no reasons to be reluctant to remote workers. As long as the proper tools and the proper processes are set, a remote developer (and under some circumstances a manager) is more efficient if he works from home. And it makes the company save some money in most cases (less office space to rent, etc.)

Some XP/Lean methodologies are organized around the fact that the whole team is physically present but it’s quite simple to adapt the rules to integrate remote people. Skype and other tools are working fine these days.

Of course, I don’t think a 100% remote work is doable: you have to meet people physically on a regular basis. That’s important because a meeting in person is better in specific phases in software projects. (launch and design phases)

Anyways, here’s a condensed list of tips if you have never worked remotely and might do it.

I hope you will find them useful. And if you are a remote worker and have other tips, please comment this blog post.

Tip #1 – Everything you do, should be done in a VCS and an issue tracker

For all aspects of a software project, it’s important to use a Version Control System (I use Mercurial) even for your design notes or documentation. Trust me, that’s the only efficient way for other people that need to work on the same parts you are working on to stay informed. Listing the history of a file in a (D)VCS gives the reader a good understanding of what’s going on.

The only problem with this approach is that everyone in the team needs to know how to use a VCS. Marketers and other people that are not used to developers tools might be reluctant with this, but there are GUI tools now on the top of every good VCS system (like Tortoise).

Like the VCS, using a good issue tracker to track every task that is done is very important. And issues should be linked to VCS changesets and vice-versa.

I use for instance Bitbucket with Mercurial, and they have a nice plugin that will add a comment to an issue with a link to a changeset, if you use the proper tag in the changeset comment when you push your change. All issues trackers do this these days: Trac, Jira, etc.

Tip #2 – A daily over-the-phone quick meeting is a good idea

The best way to follow what other people are doing in the project is to have quick meetings every day. I don’t think it’s a good idea to have the meeting in the morning, because people don’t start their work at the same time and it’s better to discuss what’s hot (==what you have done during the day.). So I like evening meetings better.

A short meeting on Skype or over the phone, that doesn’t last more than ten minutes, is perfect. It will “force” you to briefly summarize what you have done during the day before the meeting starts. Doing these brief summaries is a great exercise for yourself too: it helps you understand where you spend your time.

And don’t do these meetings over IRC or chat: a voice meeting is faster, and is a good opportunity to “humanize” your work day a little bit. Spending a whole day at home working alone can be depressing sometimes, so hearing your colleague voices feels good.

Tip #3 – Your new office open-space is an IRC room

The best way to communicate instantly with your colleagues is a room in the Internet Relay Chat or any other IM system that allows several people to talk. I’ve also discovered lately Etherpad, which is the perfect IRC companion : a real-time collaborative text editor.

Tip #4 – Separate your private life from your work

Some people think that working at home means you work less, but that’s a myth. Most of the time, you work more because it’s so easy to finish something you have started, when you are at home. It’s not fun to work alone in the evening in a big open space once other people have left .

But working late at home is a very dangerous habit for your private life. Your wife and kids will start to hate your work. So be sure to have office hours and to separate physically your office from the rest of the house.

Sprinting on Plone from 15th until the 19th of March

About 30 people from around the world have joined to work on improvements for the upcoming Plone 4 release at the Cathedral Sprint in Köln, Germany. Six people from Four Digits have joined on Monday morning to work on several PLIPS. The event is sponsored and hosted by GFU Cyrus AG at nice location including good food! After the first two days a lot of work already is done. We have seen some nice things and made good progress.

Things being worked on right now:

• Collections: http://dev.plone.org/plone/ticket/9295
• Content export/import: http://dev.plone.org/plone/ticket/9328
• Calendaring: http://dev.plone.org/plone/ticket/9302
• Commenting: http://dev.plone.org/plone/ticket/9288
• Search results UI: http://dev.plone.org/plone/ticket/9352
• Dutch and german translations for Plone 4
• Performance improvements

Useful links:

• http://plone.org/events/sprints/whatis
• http://www.coactivate.org/projects/cathedral-sprint-2010/project-home
• http://plone.org/documentation/glossary/plip

Here is your opportunity to tell your Plone friends and colleagues about what you are doing at the upcoming Plone Symposium East 2010 at Penn State.  Speakers receive a $75 discount off the early bird price of PSE2010.  What a deal! But time is running out, less than a week left to get your proposal submitted.

We are particularly interested in hearing how you are using Plone at your educational institution or the products that you have created to support your institution. If you are an integrator or developer, we have a special technical track to tell your story about your new products.  The final date for speaker proposals is March 22nd.  Sign up now to be a Speaker!

While you are at our site, why not sign-up to host a Sprint on a special topic. Here is the link for Sprints too.

Great training opportunities (Plone Bootcamp, Theming, Javascript/JQuery in Plone, Mini PyCamp, WSGI, Deliverance)

Registration information also available too.

Help us host the only Plone event in North America in 2010. Be a sponsor. We need your support.

Note: Special initiatives to support Plone in Education will be announce, you will want to be involved.

Happy Valley is a wonderful place in the Spring, see why.

Join us!

I did my presentation yesterday, and it seems like people enjoyed it, from what I’ve heard in the halls and seen online. I am very glad about this feedback because packaging is not the sexiest topic in programming conferences in general.

Anyways, here are my slides : http://ziade.org/slides/pycon-2010-state-of-packaging.pdf

EDIT: And here’s the video on blip :  http://bit.ly/dlPB2X

And as promised, I’ve answered to all the questions people asked in the google moderator : http://www.google.com/moderator/#16/e=4395 . Thanks to everyone that has participated.

I am now going to enjoy the rest of the Pycon event and I am looking forward to the sprints.