[wellylug] Presentation on Plone at July 12 WellyLUG meeting

[Damon Lynch]

Hello,

I am going to be using the newly launched Human Rights Network website 

http://www.humanrights.net.nz/ 

to make a presentation on Plone to WellyLUG on July 12, 7:40pm.  Plone
is a free and open source web content management system (CMS).  What is
a CMS?  A CMS allows you to manage content, usually for a web site. The
main goals of CMS are to allow easy creation, publishing and retrieval
of content to fit an organisation's needs (1). Or to put it another way,
with a CMS like Plone you can build cool websites, with plenty of
different people adding content to it -- including those who lack skills
in HTML. 

Plone is the "clear leader" in the field of Web publishing portals,
according to eWeek, who gave it their "Analyst's Choice" award (2). 
Like GNU/Linux, it is licensed using the GPL. This is the main Plone
site:

http://plone.org

In the presentation I will be covering some of these aspects of Plone
(depending on time and interest):

      * on the fly conversion of Word and OpenOffice documents to web
        pages including images
      * CMS stuff like "roles" (e.g. member, reviewer, administrator)
        and workflow (getting content through the publishing process)
      * handling of content types like events and news items
      * option for HTML / plain text e-mail newsletters based on
        powerful templating and flexible content criteria
      * integrated discussion forums
      * programmatic generation of PDF files from site content
      * powerful form validation
      * ease of use to build new content types including code generation
        from UML class models
      * relationship between Plone and Zope

Feel free to visit the Human Rights Network, and of course you are very
welcome to join up and become a member yourself.  There is a User Guide
currently being written that demonstrates from the user's perspective
how the site works.

Richard Naylor is planning to be make a video of this presentation, and
if all goes well it will be up on the web.  Thanks Richard!

How to get in the Meeting on July 12
------------------------------------

Meetings are held once a month on the second Monday, from 7:30 PM to
10PM) at LAN Place in Eagle Technologies House - 150 Willis Street,
Wellington. 

Entrance to LAN Place may be obtained by pressing the buzzer above the
card reader to the left of the door. Press the buzzer and wait for
someone to let you in, you may be asked your name or to confirm that you
are attending a WellyLUG meeting before you get let in. Then take the
lift to the fourth floor and turn to your right. You will see a sign on
the door that says LAN Place.

Kind regards
Damon

References:
(1) http://plone.org/documentation/book/1
(2) http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1557819,00.asp