News

Indiana University School of Medicine chose Six Feet Up to host their Logical Observation Identifiers Names and Codes (LOINC®) website. The purpose of the LOINC® database is to facilitate the exchange and pooling of results, such as blood hemoglobin, serum potassium, or vital signs, for clinical care, outcomes management, and research.

LOINC® is a voluntary effort housed in the Regenstrief Institute, an internationally respected non-profit medical research organization associated with Indiana University. LOINC was initiated in 1994 by the Regenstrief Institute and developed by Regenstrief and the LOINC committee as a response to the demand for electronic movement of clinical data from laboratories that produce the data to hospitals, physician's offices, and payers who use the data for clinical care and management purposes.

Indiana University School of Medicine relied on Six Feet Up's customized server setup and other professional services to facilitate the transfer. Six Feet Up also assisted in helping get their Zope instances and website setup.

As an official sponsor of this event, Six Feet Up presented several discussions at the Plone Symposium East 2008 at Penn State University in State College, PA on March 12-13, 2008 with Six Feet Up staff nearly filling the entire day on Wednesday March 12. This symposium was the first event since Plone 3.0's release and featured presentations, tutorials, hands-on training, sprints, and networking opportunities for all Plone users.

Director of Engineering Calvin Hendryx-Parker lead two panel discussions: "Plone Strategic Planning & Plone Foundation Update" and "So You Want to be a Plone Consultant?"  In the opening panel, Calvin and other leaders from the Plone community discussed the results of the Strategic Planning Summit, updates on the current  work of the Plone Foundation, and the future directions of Plone. The lunch panel gave insight on what it really takes to make it as an open source consultant. Calvin also presented "Plone's Anatomy" which answered all your developer questions and discussed how all the pieces of the software stack interact with one another.

Senior Developer Clayton Parker presented "Getting Plone Ready for the Prom." Some of the topics touched on were a review of the various philosophies to reskinning Plone, augmenting the site layout via viewlets, when to use Zope 3 resources, and information about registering your customizations with the resource registries. The presentation also went over how to use base properties to create your site's very special look.

"Cross-Training for Your Plone Deployment" featured Andrew Parker and Calvin Hendryx-Parker using a live benchmark approach to reveal the secrets of reaching peak performance by going through a series of steps to configure your software and hardware. Proving that small changes have big effects a live demo was used to show a race between two setups: Plone with just Zope on the front-end versus Plone with a ZEO Cluster, Nginx and Squid.

Finally, Kurt Bendl, formerly of the University of Louisville, presented a case study on how UofL supports a large Plone infrastructure. UofL has nearly 200 departments using Plone already and the case study detailed  the processes, products and hardware involved. Existing problems and plans for the future were also discussed.

Click here for videos from the Symposium: Videos from Plone Symposium East 2008

The University of Virginia Health System launched "Live Red", an online resource designed to increase awareness among women of the risk factors and symptoms of heart disease.

Powered by the Plone 3 Content Management System, Live Red features recipes and articles on nutrition, fitness and research findings to support and maintain a heart-healthy lifestyle.

Club Red is the community space within the Live Red website where members can post comments on articles, write recipe reviews and share tips for improving heart health with other members.

The project was carried out and completed by Six Feet Up in less than a month, leveraging many of the out-of-the box functionalities that come with Plone 3. The site is hosted by Six Feet Up.

GEI Consultants, Inc., one of the nation’s leading geotechnical, environmental, water resources, and ecological science and engineering consulting firm, has asked Six Feet Up to help tune their existing Plone-based intranet in preparation for the addition of advanced functionalities.

The project mainly aims at setting up Ldap Authentication on GEI's server, configuring full text indexing, tuning Kupu and performing data migration.

In addition, Six Feet Up will be setting up BlobFile support. BlobFile enables Plone to more efficiently handle large binary files and will provide GEI with a performance boost.

Steel Grip, Inc., a manufacturer of protective clothing based in Illinois, is pleased to announce that their new content-managed e-commerce website has launched.

Designed and developed by Six Feet Up, the new site presents visitors with three ways to browse through products by clothing type, protection type or material type. Related products and documents are conveniently located next to each product listing for further information.

Six Feet Up completed the redesign of the site based on Steel Grip's existing collaterals and implemented the project using Ruby on Rails, a popular open source technology.