18. Apr 2008 
3 comments
Justin James and I presented our talk “Plone and Django: Comparing Tools for Python Web Developers” at Seattle Plone last night to an enthused audience.
Most were familiar with just one platform or the other, so it was a great opportunity to ask questions and learn about the strengths of each platform.
http://presentations.webcollective.coop/django-plone
29. Jan 2008 
0 comments
What does the process look like when 80+ people get together in a weekend with the goal of building a new company and a product?
Here’s a quick overview of:
how the development process worked
the platform we picked (Python and Django)
the successful building of a complete website in two days (skillbit.com)
and what’s next.
26. Jan 2008 1 comment
We’ve picked our company product, and have 2 days to finish it during Startup Weekend.
The dev team inventoried its skills and discovered the expected diversity of platforms, skills and languages for the 30+ back-end developers – PHP, Python, Ruby, and .NET. What strategy do we use to merge our skills and get the product [...]
16. Dec 2007 0 comments
To help illustrate MetaNav, I’ve created two screencasts:
MetaNav Overview screencast (direct link to full-size version)
Plone Walk-through of MetaNav screencast (direct link to full-size version)
Briefly, this product allows Plone administrators and content-editors to build and maintain an alternate navigation hierarchy for their site, such as in audience-based and topic-based navigation schemes.
For more information [...]
07. Oct 2007 0 comments
I wanted to wish Plonistas a safe journey to Naples for what will be another fantastic Plone conference!
Back in Seattle, we’re looking forward to hearing post-conference highlights at our upcoming Halloween Plone Meeting.
I’m particularly excited for five Seattle-area Plonistas (that I know of) who are presenting this year. After seeing previews of two of these [...]
07. Oct 2007 2 comments
Encouraged by excellent suggestions from the Plone community, Derek and I checked out some of the open-source products including pyGTD, Chandler, and Plone Extreme Management. And combined with the plethora of interesting proprietary solutions, it was obvious there are many directions an open source GTD project can take.
To help organize this project, and make [...]
21. Sep 2007 11 comments
A roundtrip flight from Seattle to the East Coast is all you need to start your next Python pet project. (Remember to take some vacation in between though!)
I used this time to start development on a python library for the Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology. I’ve been practicing GTD over the last couple [...]
04. Sep 2007 4 comments
In one fell swoop, Eric Magnuson’s interview in SIJ’s Five under 35 article highlights the recent formation of our company Web Collective Inc — as well as connections around worker-owned cooperatives, Seattle’s Business Alliance for Local Living Economics (BALLE) chapter, and the Sustainable MBA Program at Bainbridge Graduate Institute.
Many of us in Web Collective met [...]
04. Sep 2007 6 comments
Spam leaves no stone unturned. How does one protect those Plone web forms that are open for anonymous web users to spam, such as the Plone contact form?
I found a straight-forward and effective solution offered by the PloneCaptcha’s product. Here are the steps to add this feature to your default Plone contact form.
03. Sep 2007 0 comments
Back in March, Andrew Burkhalter and I wrote a tutorial for creating new content-types based on remember, and as part of that created the sampleremember Plone product. Since then, I’ve had a couple of live project opportunities to put sampleremember through its paces.
By September, I fixed bugs in sampleremember and added some unit tests, [...]