News

Six Feet Up has announced that its Plone Deployment Workshop will be held at the Omni Severin in Indianapolis November 11  and 12.  The Omni Severin is a Four-Diamond and  Four-Star Hotel in the heart of downtown Indianapolis that offers luxury rooms and first-class conference space. Carey Limousine has shared rides to and from the Indianapolis International Airport.

Just steps away from Indy's hottest nightlife, the Omni also is connected to the shopping, dining and entertainment offered at  Circle Center Mall.  Their site offers a virtual tour which provides an overview of the amenities they offer

The Early Bird rate for the Plone Deployment Workshop is available until September 30.  

The Plone Foundation has announced that Plone 4 has been released and is available.  Plone 4 offers new features such as

• More powerful management of users and groups
• Searching and indexing improvements
  
• A reduced memory footprint
• Many Plone 3 add-ons now are part of basic Plone 4

Chris McDonough, author of the book "The repoze.bfg Web Application Framework" will be a featured speaker at the 2010 Plone Deployment Workshop in Indianapolis November 11 and 12.  McDonough is a Python Developer and consultant with Agendaless, based in Fredericksburg, VA.   He will talk about Supervisor, for which he is well known in the Python community.  Supervisor allows administrators to manage processes on a Unix-based system without being root, and McDonough was instrumental in its creation.

Six Feet Up earned the SWaM (Small, Woman- and/or Minority) certification from the State of Virginia's Department of Minority Business Enterprise. The certification requires proof that a woman or minority is the primary manager as owner and CEO.  This places Six Feet Up in a database with the State of Virginia, allowing one to search for a woman- or minority-owned business at www.dmbe.virginia.gov. 

In 2006, Virginia's then-Governor Tim Kaine set forth a 40% goal of purchases from SWaMs for the Commonwealth and established a Small Business Set-Aside Program, as well as several other initiatives for state agencies and departments to enhance SWaM participation in procurement activities.

CEO Gabrielle Hendryx-Parker said of the certification, "We were so pleased to receive the news that we had earned this certification.  Virginia's support of women- and minority-owned businesses encourages those who dream of owning their own business and helps them achieve success." 

Six Feet Up also is certified as a Woman Business Enterprise through the National Women Business Owners Corporation and certified with the Women's Business Enterprise National Council. Six Feet Up is a member of the National Association of Professional Women.

Six Feet Up is making its Plone banners available from its website.  Six Feet Up uses the banners for events where it has booth space or where other promotional opportunities are available.

The first banner describes what Plone is and highlights the features that distinguish it from competitors.  The second banner lists many easily-recognized companies that use Plone.  Arranged by industry, the list demonstrates the variety and complexity of many Plone clients.

If you need a banner for an event, the .pdf and .ai files are available for download.     

Six Feet Up has donated network hardware to Geist Montessori Academy , a public charter school, open to all K-8 students in the state of Indiana.

The donation includes a data rack, an Apple Xserve, a PoE Ethernet Switch and a 4-port TDM VOIP card   In addition, Six Feet Up CTO Calvin Hendryx-Parker will donate his time and talent to assist with the school's network set up.  The school recently moved to a new location and will open September 8. 

Plone expert Elizabeth Leddy will speak at the Plone Deployment Workshop 2010 in November.  The workshop will be in Indianapolis, November 11-12.  Ms. Leddy brings eleven years of background in development and deployment of applications on Python platforms to her presentation about Plone scalability and performance.  Always a champion of open source solutions, her experiences in a variety of industries give her a unique perspective.  Six Feet Up is proud to host an event where Ms. Leddy will share her extensive knowledge of  Plone deployment.

Constant improvement and innovation in the releases are continuing to keep Plone ahead of the CMS curve whether it be open source or commercial. This release has focused on freshening up the Plone UI while under the hood Plone has gained some features to improve its scalability and performance such as BLOBs and Python 2.6.

Plone 4 was developed to meet the needs of users who were finding that Plone 3 did not include many of the features they most used. In addition the Plone Framework Team has been busy keeping Plone on track with the a more modern Python/Zope release.

Some of those improved features include:

These enhancements work to create a better Plone experience for end users, developers and system administrators. We can't wait for the final release and Six Feet Up is already developing new projects using Plone 4.

Six Feet Up System Administrators Lars Noldan and Kurt Maier will attend Ohio LinuxFest 2010, September 10-12.

Ohio LinuxFest 2010 will feature Stormy Peters, Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation,  as its opening Keynote Speaker.   The evening Keynote Speak will be Christopher "Monty" Montgomery, founder of the Xiph.org Foundation.

Ohio LinuxFest 2010 is dedicated to making Open Source open to everyone.  Professionals, enthusiasts and anyone interested in learning more about Free and Open Source Software is encouraged to attend.

Lars believes that regional events like this one are vital. "Ohio LinuxFest gives Six Feet Up an opportunity to connect with the larger Open Source community in the Midwest."

Kurt said he is looking forward to the conference, noting, "I plan to attend talks that will show me how the latest Linux tools and strategies can expand the reach of Plone and help us bring our content management system to new levels of stability and ease of use."

Six Feet Up is pleased to announce it is unveiling today SolrIndex 1.0, a product for Plone/Zope that provides enhanced searching capabilities by leveraging Solr, the popular open source enterprise search platform from the Apache Lucene project.

"We are very excited to contribute this new product to the open source community.", says Six Feet Up's CEO Gabrielle Hendryx-Parker. "The sheer volume of content produced nowadays makes it critical for both public websites and intranets to come with highly relevant search capabilities."

Out of the box, SolrIndex brings in more relevant search results by replacing Plone's default full-text indexing with Solr-based search features, and including the ability to assign weights to certain fields.

Leveraging Solr's advanced search algorithms, SolrIndex comes with exciting features, such as the ability to use stopwords and synonyms. Stopwords allow to control which words the search mechanism should ignore, and synonyms make it possible to extend a query by including additional matches.

SolrIndex also comes with blazing fast and highly scalable search capabilities. SolrIndex is extensible by design, which means it has the ability to integrate with other indexes and catalogs. This is good news for sites that need to provide search capabilities across multiple repositories.

With additional customization, SolrIndex also has the ability to provide faceted search, highlighting of query terms, spelling suggestions and "more like this" suggestions.

Thanks to SolrIndex, Plone and Zope-powered sites now benefit from truly enterprise search capabilities.

For detailed documentation and to download SolrIndex, please visit http://pypi.python.org/pypi/alm.solrindex/1.0

Leveraging the success of its Plone Tune-Up events Six Feet Up announced today the first Plone Video Product Tune-Up. Tune-Ups are regular online events that aim at advancing the award-winning Plone Content Management System.

Scheduled to take place on June 17th and 18th, 2010, the sprint will focus on improving Plone4Artists Video (a.k.a. "P4A Video"), a product which allows the addition of videos to websites powered by the award-winning Plone CMS. Plone4Artists Video supports the uploading of video files and embedding of videos that are already hosted on popular video sharing sites such as Youtube and Google Video.

This first P4A Video Tune-Up will include updating documentation in the deployment process, updating install files, fixing issues, and making the product compatible with Plone 4. "Many sites in the Education and Non-Profit sectors use Plone4Artists Video", explains Gabrielle Hendryx-Parker, Six Feet Up's CEO, "This sprint will provide improvements to many organizations that are depending on P4A Video."

Six Feet Up invites any developer interested in participating to check out the Tune-Up details section in Google groups.

For more information about the event, please contact the organizer Lucie Lejard.

After great success with launching its Patient and Consumer site, the University of Virginia Health Systems has engaged Six Feet Up again to assist, this time, with development updates for their Epic Communicator site.

The site, powered by the Plone Content Management System (CMS), serves as a resource for information about the EpicCare (EMR system) implementation at UVa. This site is designed to deliver tailored information based on roles within the organization. As a result, web visitors identify themselves according to the option that best matches their role, for instance MD, DDS, LIP fall under "Providers", RN, LPN, APN are registered as "Nursing", Technologists, Labs and Pharmacy go to "Allied", and Front Desk Staff, Schedulers, Physician Secretaries are assigned the "Support" category.

Six Feet Up will be implementing various enhancements to the site, including the support for audience-driven content for selected items from the global navigation system. Updates will be made to the Homepage and Resource Center templates, as well as information organization. In addition, the company will be improving the site's user interface by modifying styles site-wide.

The new version of the Epic Communicator website is scheduled to roll out within the next few months.

Regenstrief Institute, Inc., an internationally recognized informatics and healthcare research organization, has reached out to Six Feet Up for development assistance with launching the Indiana Center of Excellence in Public Health Informatics (icePHi) section of their Plone site. This initiative seeks to enhance the ways public health practitioners exchange and respond to information effectively with other community partners. 

The site will feature information related to icePHi, including leadership bios, projects, events, publications, and contact information. The launch is targeted for early June 2010.

Six Feet Up is pleased to announce they have been certified as a Historically Underutilized Business (HUB) firm with the State of North Carolina.

The company applied for the new Statewide Uniform Certification Program in order to be listed in the North Carolina centralized HUB and minority/women business database, and be eligible to bid on web development projects for local and state entities.

Six Feet Up already has clients in the state, such as the University of North Carolina, and the Durham Public School district, and stands ready to leverage its new status to foster the company's growth and profitability.

Plone Symposium East will be taking place for its third year at the end of May 2010. The two-day conference is preceded by three days of training, and followed by two days of sprints. Six Feet Up, an official sponsor of the event, will be sending five team members to attend and present.

Sr. Template Developer Chrissy Wainwright will lead a two-day training on how to theme a Plone site. She will walk through the entire process from start to finish, using a pre-created sample design.  The training will be very hands-on, and the attendees will be able to walk away with a completed theme product, which will be a great reference for future development. Guests interested in attending the training are encouraged to register online.

Six Feet Up's CTO Calvin Hendryx-Parker will share his expertise during two talks at the Symposium. The first will be along side Paul Everitt and Tom Moroz, where they will talk about Large-scale Knowledge Management Systems using Plone Technologies. In addition, Calvin will give a talk on the Solr search engine, and explain how it can be integrated with Plone for a large project.

Sr. Developer Clayton Parker will lead attendees on a journey to become a Python zen master in his talk "Code With Style". His talk will focus on the Python style guide, and why it is important.

System Administrator Lars Noldan will be giving a talk on "Plone on RelStorage". He will explain what RelStorage is, and the benefits it can bring to your Plone site.

For more information, please visit the Plone Symposium East website, where you can preview the schedule and sign up to attend.

Six Feet Up is pleased to announce they will be attending the 2010 CMS Expo in Chicago, May 3rd-5th, a conference that showcases the best in the Content Management System world including Joomla, Drupal, WordPress and Plone.

Six Feet Up's CTO Calvin Hendryx-Parker and other associates will be on hand at the Plone booth to answer questions, provide information about the award-winning open source Content Management System Plone, and make several presentations as part of the Plone track.

"We are delighted to be part of the Plone Foundation booth and represent the Plone Community at this major Chicago event," stated Hendryx-Parker. "Plone is among the top 2% of all open source projects worldwide, and we have successfully deployed it for major universities, school districts, corporations and non-profits," he adds. "We believe in open source and giving time to promote Plone at this event is part of contributing back to the Community."

Six Feet Up Sr. System Administrator Andrew Parker will be presenting a talk on Plone site administration on May 3rd at 3pm. And Calvin Hendryx-Parker, Six Feet Up's CTO and Vice President of the Plone Foundation, will speak on implementing microsites in Plone via a product called Lineage on May 5th at 10am.

Six Feet Up invites anybody interested in learning more about open source CMS to stop by the Plone booth and talk to their team representatives.

Six Feet Up is happy to announce the release 0.4 of Lineage, the microsite creation product for Plone.

This new version uses an activation based system instead of having a 'Child Folder' type. Now a folder will have the option for a subtype named 'Child Site'. A migration was written to transform the 'Child Folder' from the 0.1 version to the current sub typed version. Other improvements include i18n support and an un-install profile.

Lineage 0.4 also includes a fix to a major security issue introduced by p4a.subtyper, the code powering the subtyping functionalities of the Plone product. Prior to the update, permissions for subtyping were zope.public and an anonymous user could change existing folders into children sites.

Overall, this new release of Lineage comes with more documentation, better security and more testing. And it is now also fully compatible with Plone 4.

For more details, please visit http://pypi.python.org/pypi/collective.lineage/

Six Feet Up, a 10+ year old open source web consulting company located near Indianapolis, IN, will be holding a FREE information event about the enterprise open source Content Management System (CMS) Plone. The event will take place on April 28th, 2010, from 1-3pm at the Indiana Historical Society, downtown Indianapolis, IN.

A proud sponsor of World Plone Day 2010, Six Feet Up will present and demo the open source CMS, and explain how companies can leverage its web content management, social software, collaboration and enterprise portal features. The Hoosier company has helped hundreds of organizations, from small businesses to large international corporations, install and configure Plone either as a public-facing site or an intranet. "The open source movement is growing fast in Europe and on both coasts of the US," explains Gabrielle Hendryx-Parker, CEO of Six Feet Up. "We want to make sure Indiana is kept up-to-date on these new technologies and can successfully compete in a global economy."

Thousands of organizations including large and small businesses, educational institutions, government agencies, nonprofits, science organizations, media outlets and publishers are using Plone to power their websites. Organizations as diverse as NASA, Oxfam, Amnesty International, Nokia, eBay, Disney, Novell, the FBI, the State Universities of Pennsylvania and Utah, as well as many governments round the world such as the UK, Belgian, Brazilian, Australian and New Zealand governments have chosen Plone to power both public-facing and internal websites.

The World Plone Day event is a global initiative by user groups, developers and the Plone Foundation. In previous years, over a hundred local events were planned around the Globe. The Indianapolis World Plone Day event will take place on April 28th, 2010 from 1-3pm in the Learning Lab at the Indiana Historical Society, 450 West Ohio St, Indianapolis, IN. 

Six Feet Up encourages people interested in attending the event to register by sending an email to info@sixfeetup.com, and get a chance to win a $50 iTunes gift certificate (only attendees will be eligible). For more information, contact Lauren Edwards at lauren@sixfeetup.com or by phone at 317-861-5948 x616.

ABOUT SIX FEET UP

Founded in San Francisco, California, in 1999 and headquartered in Fortville, Indiana, Six Feet Up, Inc. is a private WBE certified woman-owned company that integrates, develops and hosts web applications powered by the award-winning Plone open source content management system and the open source knowledge management platform KARL.

With hundreds of clients including many top universities and Fortune 500 companies, Six Feet Up is a leading provider of Plone-based solutions and services in North America. More information about Six Feet Up can be found online at http://sixfeetup.com.

EnergyCAP, the 30-year leader in energy efficiency software, has entered into an agreement with Six Feet Up for Plone mentoring and consulting.  EnergyCAP has recently started a website redesign project utilizing Plone, and is looking for assistance with implementation best practices, buildouts, and overall use of Plone capabilities.

Jeff Sexton, engagement Project Manager with Six Feet Up, states, "Consulting projects like this are in right our sweet spot.  WIth the expertise available on our staff, we know we'll be able to provide EnergyCAP with the help they need."

As the interest in open-source technology continues to increase, Six Feet Up hopes to provide more companies and organizations the assistance they need to implement new functionality.

Six Feet Up is pleased to announce the company will reprise its Plone Deployment Workshop this Fall.

Scheduled to take place in downtown Indianapolis, IN, on Nov. 11th and 12th, the event will focus on successful deployment strategies for Plone, and will address topics such as buildout, caching, LDAP integration, RelStorage, etc.

Six Feet Up invites anybody interested in attending the event to submit suggestions regarding talking points that could be added to the agenda. Please email your ideas/questions to carol@sixfeetup.com.

As a sponsor of the Women Working in Technology 2010 Conference, Six Feet Up invites you to participate in a day devoted to exchanging ideas and engaging in creative ways to help you in your work and your life.

The event is scheduled to take place on April 16, 2010 from 8AM to 5AM at the Sheraton Indianapolis City Centre Hotel.

Featuring Stacey Halota, Vice President of Information Security and Privacy at the Washington Post Company and Secure Computing Magazine's 2009 CSO of the Year, as the keynote speaker, the conference will be centered around "Securing Your Future" throughout different realms of your life. Topics include:

• Securing information
• Leading a business revolution
• Getting from here to there: what habits you need to lose to be successful
• Educating yourself: why you need to know about virtualization
• Creating work/life balance

JUSTGeorgia, a statewide juvenile justice coalition, has selected Six Feet Up to be their hosting partner. JUSTGeorgia is a statewide coalition of 500 community organizations and individuals advocating for policies that promote better outcomes for children and safer communities. JUSTGeorgia chose Six Feet Up based on a recommendation from one of our satisfied clients.

"We are excited to provide hosting services for JUSTGeorgia's new website", declared Carol Ganz, Six Feet Up Hosting Director. "The hosting infrastructure will support our client's need to distribute new legislative information to parents and child advocates in a timely and efficient manner."

Six Feet Up is pleased to announce the addition of Jim Glenn to our team. Jim has been working in IT areas first for the military and then for various startups for the last 13 years. He has been working with Six Feet Up as a release manager and QA analyst for several months and recently joined the company as a full-time employee.

Jim will be focusing on increasing our support and services for the KARL Project; an open source web system for collaboration, organizational intranets, and knowledge management. WIth the hiring of Glenn as a KARL Champion, Six Feet Up is pleased to assure the KARL community of its commitment to continued support of open-source technology.

During challenging times, true innovators collaborate in an effort to maximize their effectiveness. This year, the Georgia Center for Nonprofits will be the NTC Local Host.

The NTC is all about connecting and learning so that people can transform technology into social change in their work and communities. 

Six Feet Up's CTO Calvin Hendryx-Parker will be attending the event. We encourage you to stop by the Plone Booth and meet with members of the Six Feet Up Staff.

Six Feet Up, Inc announces it has hired Jeffrey Sexton, PMP as a new Project Manager.  Sexton brings more than 11 years of project management experience to the Sixies staff through his work of successfully implementing numerous projects at Fortune 500 companies.  His expertise in managing website redesign, marketing, process improvement, and new technology deployment projects will serve as a great asset to Six Feet Up and their clients.

Jeff is a life-long Chicago Cubs fan and lives in Greenfield, Indiana with his wife and two children.

The Indiana Historical Society, a private, nonprofit membership organization that maintains the nation's premier research library and archives on the history of Indiana and the Old Northwest, launched their new website today at www.indianahistory.org

The History Center has been closed for almost a year while the staff has been focusing on completion of a series of extreme remodeling and makeover projects. The Grand Opening is scheduled for March 20, 2010, and the new website is the first preview available to the public.

The Indiana Historical Society engaged Six Feet Up to assist with the planning, development and customization of their new website, and Six Feet Up partnered with Abstract Edge to provide the non-profit with outstanding design services.

Powered by the Plone open source content management system (CMS), the new site offers easily navigated content that caters to a wide variety of visitors.

Featuring a brand new look and feel, the site offers a richer and more interactive presentation to users -- including videos, slideshows, scrollable thumbnail features, blogging, and event registration/ticketing capabilities.

From an administration perspective, content managers at the Indiana Historical Society are now able to easily manage media and keep content up-to-date without sole dependency on their technical team.

The Zope Community (http://zope.org) issued a security fix on January 13, 2010 that affects all sites using Zope 2.8 and newer. Since all Plone sites use Zope, it is strongly recommended that this latest release be applied to your Plone site. This release of Zope addresses a potential cross-site scripting vulnerability, which, if exploited, could allow attackers to access secure data in the website. Please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-site_scripting for more details.

The specific Zope update needed depends on which version of Plone you are running. See the chart below for the correct update:

----------
Plone <2.5
----------
If your Plone site is less than Plone 2.5, you are using Zope 2.7 and do not have a patch to apply.

---------
Plone 2.5
---------
Zope 2.8: http://www.zope.org/Products/Zope/2.8.12
or
Zope 2.9: http://www.zope.org/Products/Zope/2.9.12

-------
Plone 3
-------
Zope 2.10 = http://www.zope.org/Products/Zope/2.10.11


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Before you start the upgrade to the latest Zope version, make sure you have a backup of your data.fs and/or buildout.

If you have a buildout based install[1] then you can most likely change the  download URL to point to the latest Zope version, and re-run buildout.

If you have a non-buildout based install then you need to download the latest Zope version, compile[2] and make sure that your start up scripts and Zope configuration files are pointing to the latest Zope version.

Make sure to restart your site once the latest change is in Affect so that the new Zope is applied.

[1] - http://plone.org/documentation/manual/developer-manual/managing-projects-with-buildout/understanding-buildout.cfg
[2] - http://plone.org/documentation/kb/setup-from-source/

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If you would like to have Six Feet Up perform the upgrade for your site, please email support@sixfeetup.com with the subject line of "Zope Security Fix". We will then set up a Time and Materials contract with your organization for the work to be done.