Chris Calloway is once again organizing what sounds like a fantastic Plone eBoot Camp + Sprint.

The Triangle (NC) Zope and Python Users Group invites you to register for Camp 5
and the BBQ Sprint:

http://trizpug.org/boot-camp/camp5/

This is a Zope 3 boot camp followed by a Plone 3 sprint. The boot camp is taught
by Philipp von Weitershausen, author of Web Component Development with Zope 3.
The training has previously only been offered in Europe and is now available in
North America for the first time. The sprint includes several sponsored and
invited sprinters.

TriZPUG hopes you will participate in Camp 5 in Chapel Hill, NC.

Camp 5: Saturday March 10 - Tuesday March 13, 2007

BBQ Sprint: Wednesday March 14 - Saturday March 17, 2007

I'm fascinated to watch which Plone Conference 2006 videos are turning out to be the most popular.  (Wanna see the raw stats yourself?)

So far, our top 7 videos are:

1. Eben Moglen's Keynote -- with over 950 downloads (plus over 13,000 views on YouTube)
   
2. A Sneak Peek at Plone 3.0, Alexander Limi - 587 downloads
   
3. b-org: Creating Content Types the Plone 2.5 Way, Martin Aspeli - 233 downloads
   
4. Top 20 Plone Pitfalls -- And How To Avoid Them, Stefan Holek - 195 downloads
   
5. High Performance Plone, Joel Burton - 188 downloads
6. 100 Hours or Less: Creating a Scope of Work for a Simple Plone Website, Patrick Shaw - 187 downloads
   
7. Graduating from Spaghetti to Sushi: Plone for PHPers, Sean Kelly - 185 downloads
   

It's no surprise to see Eben and Alex's talks at the top of the pile.  Martin, Stefan and Joel are both well-known Plone community members, and they all gave bang-up presentations. 

It's particularly gratifying to see Patrick and Sean's talks rounding out the top 7, though.  Both Patrick and Sean are relative newcomers to the Plone community.  Both of their talks were relatively non-technical talks aimed at fellow Plone newbies.  I think we're seeing strong evidence here of a thirst for solid information aimed at the everyday concerns of people who are implementing Plone projects.

Plone co-founder (and Google UI Designer) Alex Limi will be speaking at WebGuild Silicon Valley's next meeting, Jan. 17, 2007 from 6 - 9:30 p.m. 

Their topic is "The Future of Site Design" and the panel discussion will feature Alex, along with folks from Oracle and Yahoo's UI teams. 

Jan. 17, 2007 from 6 - 9:30 p.m.
6 p.m. - Reception; 7 p.m. - Presentation

Location: Google's Mountain View campus

Registration

Blurb from site:

For web site and web app design, 2006 has been a stellar year and 2007 promises to be even better. Hear what the brightest and most cutting-edge designers in the field are saying about the future of web design. This panel will discuss trends, innovations, predictions, and the outlook for web site and app design for 2007. The panel will also address some of the best practices, principles, and methodologies in design including new age tools and technologies such as Web 2.0, design patterns libraries, and AJAX, as well as the reinvention of CSS, Flash, and much more. Get a head start on the new year. Don't miss it!

Dave Pollard, who often writes thought-provoking articles about collaboration and knowledge management offers a very concrete and practical set of "Standards for Intranet and Extranet Design."  There's a lot to like here, and a lot that Plone already nails out of the box.

1. Simple and intuitive user interface and architecture: Users should not require training or explanation to use the site. It should not be intimidating, nor should it require a lot of thought or practice to use it effectively.
2. Easy orientation: The entire content ‘landscape’ should be visible or at least apparent from the home page. No navigation tool or sitemap should be needed.
3. No overlap with content of the organization’s other websites: This entails knowing who the site’s ‘customers’ are, and when they should use an Intranet or Extranet versus a public Internet website. Generally, the Intranet is for employees and contractors, the Extranet is for ‘real’ customers of the organization’s goods and services, and the public Internet site is for prospective customers, alumni, prospective recruits, students, researchers, and the public media. Where there is overlap of content between these user constituencies it probably makes sense to repurpose the content for different audiences anyway.
4. Table-, macro- or CSS-driven: Changes and additions to content should not require html recoding. External websites may benefit from occasional refreshing or redesign for aesthetic or market-driven reasons, but internal site design should be driven by functionality and be changed as little and as rarely as possible.
5. ‘Bookmarkable’: Every resource should have its own unique URL that users can bookmark and find their way back to. That means no frames.
6. Expandable: The site should accommodate new individual and group web resources (e.g. blogs, wikis) without a need for redesign.
7. One-click access: Users should be able to get from the home page to the resource they seek in a single click. That may require use of menus that only show up when you hover, or scroll through lists in small windows, to prevent the home page being overwhelming.
8. ‘Taskonomy’ rather than taxonomy: In the site’s design, architecture and organization, ‘why are you looking?’ should prevail over ‘what are you looking for?’
9. Personally reconfigurable: Menus or scroll lists should be able to be personalized to accommodate each user’s browsing orientation (i.e. viewed/resorted in different ways).
10. User-driven content and tools: Content and tools offered on the site should be what users have indicated they want, rather than what ‘suppliers’ of content want the site to host. Likewise, content should be organized according to user’s needs, not the content supplier’s convenience. For example, internal news should be delivered through subscribable e-newsletters (see standard #14 below), instead of cluttering up Intranet and Extranet home pages.
11. Tools, not just content: The site should provide simple access to all the connectivity and other tools and technologies (both web-based and downloadable) that users need to perform their jobs effectively, along with online learning resources for each tool that teach users how and when to use each tool.
12. Search in context: Each search bar should only search a predefined subset of relevant content, not everything on the site that meets the search terms. The home page should therefore have different search bars for different purposes (e.g. search for people, search for documents, search for news, etc.) Nothing discourages users from ever visiting a site again more than lots of ‘false positives’ in search results.
13. Use of clickable graphics: Recognizing their higher development and maintenance cost, selective use should be made of ‘active’ graphics (e.g. organization charts, process charts) where these make finding or browsing easier or more effective.
14. Really simple publication and subscription: Sites should use RSS to allow users to ‘publish’ their content to the Intranet or Extranet, and to allow them to subscribe to a wide variety of internal and external content using a single ‘sign up’, and get that content delivered the way the user chooses (e.g. e-mail, aggregator page).
15. Accommodates different ways of finding: The site should give users three choices to find the information they’re looking for: browse, search, or subscribe.
16. Security is ‘under the hood’: Depending on your IDs and passwords (stored on your machine) users shouldn’t need extra sign-ins and log-in steps, and they shouldn’t see what they don’t and shouldn’t have access to (to avoid both temptation and resentment).

Some items that are especially thought-provoking for me when I consider them from the perspective of Plone are:

• "One-click access" (#7)-- this suggests that javascript-driven navigation portlet might be valuable.  KSS in Plone 3.0 should make that possible.
  
• The repeated emphasis on subscription (via email and RSS).  Plone does RSS 1.0 out of the box pretty well, and this suggests that PLIP 128 (Pluggable Plone Syndication) deserves some attention, and perhaps thinking more about email notification (for which we already have some support).
• "Search in context" (#12) - Plone Help Center already has its own search tool, as do various other add-on products.  It would be interesting to see if LiveSearch could be extended so that it initially searched the parent folder one was in, with a simple click to expand the scope of the search.  This might be hard to make highly usable, but it's an interesting notion for larger sites, and I've encountered the frustration on Plone.org.
• Personalizable confirability (#9).  This idea has bubbled up in the form of PLIP 152 - Dashboards.