1. About Mastering Plone¶

This training was created by Philip Bauer and Patrick Gerken of starzel.de to create a canonical training for future Plone developers. The aim is that anyone with the appropriate knowledge can give a training based on it and contribute to it. It is published as Open Source on github and training.plone.org.

If you want to inquire the original authors about organizing a training please contact them at team@starzel.de.

Upcoming Trainings¶

If you want to have a training near you please ask for trainings on https://community.plone.org

Previous Trainings¶

The Mastering Plone Training was so far held publicly at the following occasions:

Ploneconf 2016 in Boston
October 2015, Bucharest
March 2015, Munich
Plone Conference 2014, Bristol
June 2014, Caracas
May 2014, Munich
PythonBrasil/Plone Conference 2013, Brasilia
PyCon DE 2012, Leipzig
Plone Conference 2012, Arnheim
PyCon De 2011, Leipzig

Trainers¶

The following trainers have given trainings based on Mastering Plone:

Philip Bauer: Philip Bauer is a web developer from Munich who fell in love with Plone in 2005 and since then works almost exclusively with Plone. A historian by education he drifted towards creating websites in the 90’s and founded the company Starzel.de in 2000. He is a member of the Plone foundation, loves teaching and is dedicated to Open Source. Among other Plone-related projects he started creating the Mastering Plone Training so that everyone can become a Plone-Developer.
Patrick Gerken: Patrick Gerken works with Python since 2002. He started working with pure Zope applications and now develops mainly with Plone, Pyramid and Javascript as well as doing what is called DevOps. He works at Zumtobel Group.
Steve McMahon: Steve McMahon is a long-time Plone community member, contributor and trainer. He is the creator of PloneFormGen and maintainer of the Unified installer. Steve also wrote several chapters of Practical Plone and is an experienced speaker and instructor.
Steffen Lindner: Steffen Lindner started developing Plone in 2006. He worked on small Plone sites and also with huge intranet sites. As Open Source / Free Software developer he joined the Plone core developer team 2011 and works at Starzel.de.
Fulvio Casali: Fulvio Casali has been working almost exclusively with Plone since 2008. He struggled for years to find his way around the source code of Plone when there was no documentation and no trainings, and feels passionate about helping users and developers become proficient. He loves participating in Plone community events, and organized two strategic Plone sprints on the northwest coast of the USA and helped galvanized the developer community there.
Johannes Raggam: Johannes Raggam from Graz/Austria works most of the time with a technology stack based around Python, Plone, Pyramid and Javascript. As an active Open Source / Free Software developer he believes in the power of collaborative work. He is a BlueDynamics Alliance Partner and Plone Core Contributor since 2009, a member of the Plone Framework Team since 2012 and Plone Foundation member.
Franco Pellegrini: Franco Pellegrini is a software developer from Cordoba, Argentina. He started developing Plone in 2005 in a small software company, and as an independent contractor since 2011. He believes in free software philosophy, and so, he has been a Plone core developer since 2010 and Framework Team member since 2012.
Fred van Dijk: Fred, from Rotterdam the Netherlands, has been exposed to Plone early on as a user. In 2007 he joined Zest Software to work on and with Plone and Python web apps full time. He can focus on the business side, helping users decide on which features are most valuable to develop or when to stick with standard functionality. He also gives training on using and administering the CMS. On the IT side he has plenty technical knowledge to work on code, system administration and do project management in a team of developers.
Leonardo Caballero: Leonardo J. Caballero G. of Maracaibo, Venezuela, is a Technical Director at Covantec R.L. and Conectivo C.A. Leonardo maintains the Spanish translations of more than 49 Plone Add-ons as well as Spanish-language documentation for Plone itself. He has contributed several Plone Add-ons that are part of PloneGov. Currently serving the Plone Board as a Plone Ambassador, Leonardo has also served as an Advisory Board member and has spoken at or helped organize Plone and open-source events throughout South America.

Using the documentation for a training¶

Feel free to organize a training yourself. Please be so kind to contribute any bug fixes or enhancements you made to the documentation for your training.

The training is rendered using sphinx and builds in two flavors:

default: The verbose version used for the online documentation and for the trainer. Build it in sphinx with make html or use the online version.
presentation: A abbreviated version used for the projector during a training. It should use more bullet points than verbose text. Build it in sphinx with make presentation.

Note

By prefixing an indented block of text or code with .. only:: presentation you can control that this block is used for the presentation version only.

To hide a block from the presentation version use .. only:: not presentation

Content without a prefix will be included in both versions.

The readthedocs theme¶

We slightly tweaked readthedocs theme in _static/custom.css so that it works better with projectors:

We start hiding the navigation bar much earlier so that it does not interfere with the text.
We enlarge the default width of the content-area.

Exercises¶

Some additional javascript shows hidden solutions for exercises by clicking.

Just prepend the solution with this markup:

..  admonition:: Solution
    :class: toggle

Here is a full example:

Exercise 1
^^^^^^^^^^

Your mission, should you choose to accept it...

..  admonition:: Solution
    :class: toggle

    To save the world with only seconds to spare do the following:

    .. code-block:: python

        from plone import api

It will be rendered like this:

Exercise 1¶

Your mission, should you choose to accept it...

Solution

To save the world with only seconds to spare do the following:

from plone import api

Building the documentation locally¶

Dependencies¶

Please make sure that you have Enchant installed, this is needed for spell-checking.

Install Enchant on OS X:

brew install enchant

Install Enchant on Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install enchant

To build the documentation follow these steps:

$ git clone https://github.com/plone/training.git --recursive
$ cd training
$ virtualenv --python=python2.7 .
$ source bin/activate

Now install dependencies and build.

$ pip install -r requirements.txt
$ make html

You can now open the output from _build/html/index.html. To build the presentation version use make presentation instead of make html. You can open the presentation at presentation/index.html.

Build new¶

$ git clone https://github.com/plone/training.git --recursive
$ cd training
$ virtualenv --python=python2.7 .
$ source bin/activate
$ pip install -r requirements.txt
$ make html

Now you can open documentation with your web-bowser.

If you use OS X you can just do:

$ open _build/html/index.html

In the case of Linux, Ubuntu for example you can do:

$ firefox _build/html/index.html

Note

If you do not use Firefox but Chrome, please replace firefox with google-chrome e.g

$ google-chrome _build/html/index.html

Update existing¶

$ git pull
$ source bin/activate
$ make html
$ open _build/html/index.html

Technical set up to do before a training (as a trainer)¶

Prepare a mailserver for the user registration mail (See Configure a Mailserver)
If you do only a part of the training (Advanced) prepare a database with the steps of the previous sections. Be aware that the file- and blobstorage in the Vagrant box is here: /home/vagrant/var/ (not at the buildout path /vagrant/buildout/)

Upgrade the vagrant and buildout to a new Plone-version¶

In https://github.com/collective/training_buildout change buildout.cfg to extend from the new versions.cfg on http://dist.plone.org/release
Check if we should to update any versions in https://github.com/collective/training_buildout/blob/master/versions.cfg
Commit and push the changes to the training_buildout
Modify the vagrant-setup by modifying plone_training_config/manifests/plone.pp. Set the new Plone-version as $plone_version in line 3.
Test the vagrant-setup it by creating a new vagrant-box using the new config.

Create a new zip-file of all files in plone_training_config and move it to _static:

$ cd plone_training_config
$ zip -r plone_training_config.zip *
$ mv plone_training_config.zip ../_static/

Commit and push the changes to https://github.com/plone/training

Train the trainer¶

If you are a trainer there is a special mini training about giving technical trainings. We really want this material to be used, re-used, expanded and improved by Plone trainers world wide. These chapters don’t contain any Plone specific advice, there’s background, theory, check lists and tips for anyone trying to teach technical subjects.

Train the Trainer: How to give technical training(s)

Contributing¶

Everyone is very welcome to contribute. Minor bug fixes can be pushed directly in the repository, bigger changes should made as pull-requests and discussed previously in tickets.

License¶

The Mastering Plone Training is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Make sure you have filled out a Contributor Agreement.

If you haven’t filled out a Contributor Agreement, you can still contribute. Contact the Documentation team, for instance via the mailinglist or directly send a mail to plone-docs@lists.sourceforge.net Basically, all we need is your written confirmation that you are agreeing your contribution can be under Creative Commons. You can also add in a comment with your pull request “I, <full name>, agree to have this published under Creative Commons 4.0 International BY”.