Thursday, August 3, 2017

Why you had problems figuring out Plone (the webinar)



Presenting... Why you had problems figuring out Plone (the webinar). Okay, that's not the actual name of the webinar. Instead, we went with the more descriptive but slightly less clever Plone for Newbies - The Big Picture.

The Big Picture is about understanding the model.

If you're a developer about to begin your journey of Plone development, The Big Picture aims to fill out your understanding of how the pieces of Plone fit together. Thinking of it as a purpose built system lays a strong foundation for success.

Only smart persons use Plone

I've heard someone suggest that you have to be really smart to use Plone (implying that it is hard to use). I call it the "this helicopter is harder to use than my bicycle" problem. Every time I benefit from Plone's link integrity support, flexible access control model or use cut and paste to move content around I'm glad I'm not using a "bicycle". I like to point out Plone's comprehensive suite of tools which you'll be glad exist when you need them. For developers, once you accept that you're looking at a "helicopter" you need to spend a little time "understanding the model". As you understand the purpose of the major controls you'll find it easier to use the system to solve problems.

Why Plone? 

Now is the right time, with an increase of cybersecurity related issues, organizations should be looking to adopt secure platforms. I've been using Plone for more than 15 years, and I can confidently recommend it as a secure platform. In case you took your eye of Plone for a few years, now is a great time to give it a second look, it has kept up with modern development practices and remains an excellent choice for your content management needs.

Why a webinar? 

My target audience isn't in one geographic location, the most effective way to reach them is a virtual medium and webinars provide a well-known, tried and tested approach.
Additionally, I have run one or two webinars before, if you count online training courses. Of course, it is different when you are doing more than just showing up, reaching out to a "less captive" audience and convincing them to commit 90 minutes to a webinar. So this is new ground for me. I am learning a lot from this experience and have had a fleeting thought, maybe I'll take all this webinar and Plone stuff and do the "meta" thing, build a webinar management tool on top of Plone. You never know.




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