News

New York based publisher HarperCollins has asked Six Feet Up to help them implement a redesign for http://ya-ya.com. The Ya-Ya website is the web presence for the popular book series by Rebecca Wells. The Ya-Ya website is a Zope site that features the ability for users to log in and create groups, host photo galleries, contact information, and information on reading groups.
Six Feet Up will implement a new design for the site as new content is added and the site is reorganized.

Six Feet Up will be going to Portland, Oregon for the very first Open Source Bridge conference. While Open Source Bridge aims to be a technology agnostic conference, Plone will be well represented, along with many other open source projects.
Open Source Bridge is a community run conference that focuses on connecting open source communities, across technologies, so that we can learn from one another.

Six Feet Up attended the second annual Plone Symposium East held at Penn State. Five team members attended the conference, with three presenting four different talks. Six Feet Up was one of three sponsors for this event.

CTO Calvin Hendryx-Parker presented a talk on "How to Create Microsites with Lineage". Hendryx-Parker aslo participated in a lightening talk and sprint on Lineage, the microsite solution for Plone.

Clayton Parker presented "Buildout: Fostering Repeatability", a refreshed version of his buildout talk. Parker introduced a new talk called "Generic Setup De-Mystified" and handed out Generic Setup Quick Reference cards. Parker also gave a lightening talk on Yamal and sprinted on Lineage.

Chrissy Wainwright presented one of the most popular talks at the symposium, entitled "Understanding Plone 3 Viewlets". Wainwright gave a lightening talk on an interesting implementation of jQuerey and sprinted on updating the P4A calendaring design.

To celebrate the successful migration of http://plone.org to their servers, Six Feet Up is pleased to announce a "Plone Move-Up Special" from April 20th till May 20th, 2009.

With this one-month Special, any new client interested in moving their existing Plone sites (dedicated instances only) to Six Feet Up's virtual private servers will enjoy a 50% discount on their first month's fee and no setup fee (a saving of up to $179).

"We are excited to see the online community's positive response to the newly migrated http://plone.org site, and we want to extend our services to any organization who may not be happy with their current hosting service provider", says Six Feet Up's CEO Gabrielle Hendryx-Parker.

Organizations interested in moving their hosting services to Six Feet Up should apply online or call 866-SIX FEET (1-866-749-3338) and mention the "Plone Move-Up Special".

Six Feet Up has been providing hosting services to the Plone community since 2003 and currently serves over 500 Plone sites in both America and Europe.

Six Feet Up will take over the hosting of Plone.org, the community site for the open source content management system Plone, at 11am EDT today.   The site receives a steady and sizable flow of worldwide visitors, since Plone is among the top 2% of all open source projects worldwide, with 200 core developers and over 300 solution providers in more than 50 countries. The move of plone.org over to Six Feet Up's servers is widely expected to boost the site's performance.

"This is a big deal for both the Plone Community and Six Feet Up" according to Six Feet Up's CTO Calvin Hendryx-Parker. "The new hosting environment is based on FreeBSD for stability and features four times the processors and four times the memory - so we are ready to handle a significant increase in plone.org's traffic."

In honor of the move, and to boost traffic to the site, web visitors are encouraged to browse the newly migrated site and look for a mysterious monkey that has been hidden there.  The first 6 web visitors to click it will receive a unique t-shirt.

Plone is a powerful and flexible, enterprise-quality content management system that offers a rich set of capabilities for public websites, private intranets and collaborative workspaces. Plone.org is the starting point for finding out about Plone as it provides access to documentation about the CMS, information on the Plone Foundation, lists of upcoming events and recent news, as well as support options for Plone.The sister site Plone.net, now hosted by Pilot Systems in France, provides visitors with case studies, information about Plone consulting organizations, and media coverage on Plone.

On September 10th, 11th and 12th, 2009 Six Feet Up will host the first Plone Immersive Training Experience that will take attendees through the hands-on and guided exercise of creating and launching a real Plone site from scratch. The event will be designed to engage participants in real problem-solving activities spanning from the initial Subversion setup and buildout creation, to the stimulating task of skinning a Plone site for multiple platforms and browsers, setup of third-party Plone products, and the final deployment to the production server with the setup of caching rules.

"We encourage non-profit organizations that are in need of a brand new website to take advantage of this unique opportunity to get an enterprise-level website virtually for free", says Gabrielle Hendryx-Parker, Six Feet Up's CEO.

Non-profits may apply online before May 15th, 2009, by providing contact details and a short explanation on why they need a new website. Voting by the online community will then start and continue until June 5th. A winner will be announced on June 15th, 2009.

The chosen non-profit will just be asked to provide a final design, domain name, and copy for the site content. They will work with Six Feet Up to develop their requirements for a website. In return, the non-profit will work with top content management professionals to bring the site to life during the Plone Immersive Training Experience in September.

The non-profit website will be based on the Plone open source content management system and will include features such as an event calendar, a slideshow, a news section, embedded video files, a staff/people directory, and more.

Non-profit organizations seeking more information should review the following links for more details:
  * Application Form
  * Official Rules
  * Schedule of Development
  * FAQs

KARL (Knowledge And Resource Locator), an Open Society Institute (OSI) project,  is a web-based knowledge management application for large non-profit organizations. As it is, over 150 communities are using the system to coordinate entities scattered around the world.

Built on repoze.bfg and Python, KARL provides worldwide users with online classifieds, business and social networking tools (forums, blog, wiki, calendar, etc.), people directories, and powerful search capabilities.

The first version of KARL was developed in 2007 for OSI. In Fall 2008, two KARL 2 pilots launched in partnership with Eurasia Foundation, a private non-profit organization mainly supported by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and Synergos, a worldwide non-profit organization with a mission to reduce global poverty.

Six Feet Up was approached by OSI to be the first and premier hosting vendor for KARL and has been supporting both Eurasia Foundation and Synergos pilots since 2008.

A third, more efficient, version of KARL is currently under development and is scheduled to launch in Spring 2009. The code of KARL 3 will eventually be open-sourced by OSI under the GNU General Public License Version 2.

For more information about KARL, please contact Six Feet Up CTO Calvin Hendryx-Parker at calvin AT sixfeetup DOT com.

Six Feet Up is excited to announce that plone.org, the official Community site for the open source content management system Plone, will soon be hosted on their servers.

Following two weeks of testing, Six Feet Up will switch the DNS on April 20th, 2009 and start official hosting duties for the plone.org site. The site is the main entry point for anybody looking for information about Plone. Plone.org provides access to documentation about the CMS, information on the Plone Foundation, lists of upcoming events and recent news, as well as support options for Plone.

"We are very pleased with the Plone Foundation's decision to entrust us with the responsibility of hosting the plone.org website", says Six Feet Up CTO Calvin Hendryx-Parker. "This is a testimony to the quality of our hosting services and we are looking forward to serving the Community so it can be an effective communication platform for both developers and decision-makers."

Six Feet Up is encouraging the Plone Community to go and check-out the staging instance currently up at http://newplone.sixfeetup.com and report any issue to http://dev.plone.org/plone.org

Powered by the open source content management system Plone, the new website describes the concept behind the Plone Immersive Training Experience and provides information about the announced topics, workshops, and overall agenda. Detailed bios on all 14 of the Mentors are available and the logistics section covers all questions attendees may have about the event, from lodging to dining, transportation and Internet access.

The registration section stresses on the benefits of registering early as attendees will receive an Early Bird discount of $250 if they book their tickets by May 15th. First registrants will also be assigned the most luxurious guest rooms first.

The all-inclusive event will take place at the Historic Fort Harrison, in Indianapolis, Indiana. The venue building served as the hospital for Fort Benjamin Harrison beginning in 1906 and is now a posh, luxurious resort in the middle of the beautiful Fort Harrison State Park and adjacent to the Fort Harrison Golf Resort.

Web visitors are encouraged to spread the word by using their favorite Web 2.0 online social media tools thanks to a palette of links to sites such as Twitter.com, LinkedIn.com, Facebook and Technorati.

About the Plone Immersive Training Experience
On September 10th, 11th and 12th, 2009 Six Feet Up will host a "Plone Immersive Training Experience" that will take attendees through the hands-on and guided exercise of creating and launching a real Plone site from scratch. The event will be designed to engage participants in real problem-solving activities spanning from the initial Subversion setup and buildout creation, to the stimulating task of skinning a Plone site for multiple platforms and browsers, setup of third-party Plone products, and the final deployment to the production server with the setup of caching rules.

About Six Feet Up
Founded in San Francisco, California, in 1999, Six Feet Up, Inc. is a private WBE certified woman-owned company that integrates, develops and hosts web applications powered by the Plone open source content management system.
Six Feet Up is one of the leading providers for Plone-based solutions and hosting in the US. The company also is a big supporter of open source initiatives and has been actively contributing back to the Plone Community (e.g. MailmanAdaptor, PromoEngine, CMFDeployment, GetPaid, Lineage, Easy Slideshow, Plone Tune-Ups, etc.)

Six Feet Up, Inc. is pleased to announce that, effective March 18th, 2009, the company became certified as a Woman Business Enterprise (WBE) by the National Woman Business Owners Corporation (NWBOC).

NWBOC provides a national certification program for women-owned and controlled business as an alternative to the multiple state and local certifications required by many public and private sector agencies. Six Feet Up worked hard to achieve this certification and is pleased to pass on this news to their customers as it will allow them to to utilize credit towards their minority/diversity spending requirements.

The NWBOC certification is very important to Six Feet Up as it will provide the company with new opportunities to secure procurement leads.

To learn more about the NWBOC, visit their website at http://www.nwboc.org/.

Six Feet Up is pleased to announce the names of the confirmed Mentors for the upcoming "Plone Immersive Training Experience", scheduled to take place in Indianapolis, Indiana, this Fall.

On September 10th, 2009 Six Feet Up will host a "Plone Immersive Training Experience" that will take attendees through the hands-on and guided exercise of creating and launching a real website powered by the open source Content Management System Plone. The event will be designed to engage participants in real problem-solving activities spanning from the initial Subversion setup and buildout creation, to the delicate task of skinning a Plone site for multiple platforms and browsers, the setup of third-party Plone products, and the final deployment to a production server with the setup of caching rules.

The Plone Immersive Training event will heavily rely on the on-site presence of 14 Mentors hand selected for their experience working with Plone and their leadership skills. The Mentors will be directing a dozen workshops dedicated to core sets of components inherent to any common Plone development projects.

The Mentors will start off each workshop by giving an introductory talk on the workshop topic and will provide some related basic training. Then they will assign specific tasks to workshop attendees using the online project management system Trac. Mentors will then supervise trainees' work, pair program with them, illustrate best practices on common tasks, and answer questions.

The final list of Plone Immersive Training Mentors is:
    * David Glick (ONE/Northwest)
    * Matt Hamilton (Netsight)
    * Calvin Hendryx-Parker (Six Feet Up)
    * Gabrielle Hendryx-Parker (Six Feet Up)
    * Josh Johnson (University of North Carolina)
    * Lucie Lejard (Six Feet Up)
    * Lars Noldan (Six Feet Up)
    * Andrew Parker (Six Feet Up)
    * Clayton Parker (Six Feet Up)
    * Rob Porter (WebLion)
    * Christine Shaw (Six Feet Up)
    * JoAnna Springsteen (Six Feet Up)
    * Chrissy Wainwright (Six Feet Up)
    * Matthew Wilkes (Team Rubber)

For more information about the event, please consider joining the Plone Immersive Training mailing list.

WBE (Woman Business Enterprise) Certification denotes that a woman has majority ownership and control of a business entity.

As a private, woman-owned company, Six Feet Up is looking forward to the WBE Certification as it will add credibility to the company and boost its business development efforts. Having WBE Certification is the only way purchasing agents have confidence that a business representing itself as woman-owned is in fact woman-owned. Most publicly held corporations, as well as larger private corporations, track and/or have programs for doing business with women business owners. Also, most local, state, and federal government purchasing agencies track and have programs for doing business with women-owned vendor companies. They, too, rely on WBE Certification.

Six Feet Up is pleased to announce the release of Lineage, the microsite creation product for Plone. Lineage is a product that allows subfolders of a Plone site to appear as autonomous Plone sites to the everyday user. This hub and spoke structure allows site administrators to easily manage multiple, seemingly independent, sub-entity websites in one Plone. Furthermore, the "parent" site can access and view the content in all the "child" sites while the child sites only view their own content. The parent site can also syndicate chosen content to the selected child sites. Lineage is  less complex and easier to manage than a cluster of nested Plone sites but gives users all the same benefits.

Lineage can be used within a large organization to manage multiple sub-sites , such as school district sites, university departments, corporate product sites, public library satellites,  professional association events, and more.

Six Feet Up would especially like to thank Martin Aspeli for his inspiration and the Duke Clinical Research Institute group for project funding.

For more information, visit Lineage on pypi or the Plone Software Center.

Six Feet Up is pleased to announce they have been chosen to be the new hosting provider for plone.org, the Plone community website.

Six Feet Up has been providing Zope and Plone hosting services since 1999 and is proud to serve prominent clients such as Oxfam North America, Science Festival Foundation, George Washington University (Gelman Library) and IEEE Information Theory Society.

The Plone open source Content Management System (CMS) exists online through two public facing sites: plone.org, the open source community website where visitors can find technical documentation on Plone, and plone.net that features case studies and information on Plone vendors.

Plone.org's dedicated server with Six Feet Up will include:

• Dual Quad Core Intel Xeon 2.83 GHz
• 1333 MHz Front Side Bus
• 2 x GigE NICs
• 6 x 250 GB 7200RPM HD 8MB Cache
• Raid Controller with 256 MB Cache (configured in RAID-10)
• 16 GB Dual Ranked DIMMS
• FreeBSD OS
  

Six Feet Up will also provide system monitoring, nightly backups, and general system administration services.

Shay Vanlymen, Six Feet Up Director of Technical Services, is excited to meet the needs for the Plone Community: "We've upgraded our infrastructure, purchased new hardware, added additional redundant power, and added additional bandwidth in preparation for this move."

Six Feet Up CEO Gabrielle Hendryx-Parker adds: " Six Feet Up takes our contribution to the Plone community seriously and this is a chance for the hosting and infrastructure side of the house to give back. "

After evaluating 20+ Content Management Systems, the Health System department of the University of Virginia came to two finalists: Drupal and Plone. The University then asked independent consultants to come and present both systems. Six Feet Up's CTO Calvin Hendryx-Parker flew in to demo Plone and answered questions mostly about usability, out-of-the box features and security. As a result, UVa Health System selected Plone to replace their home-grown CMS system, and asked Six Feet Up to assist them with their future implementations.

Six Feet Up presents the first Plone Immersive Training Experience: learn Plone in a professional hands-on experience where you'll produce a live Plone site for a real client in less than 60 hours. 

How did you learn most of what you know? Through books, or by being immersed in the daily challenges that your work environment provides? Our brains receive an endless flux of stimuli and are constantly in filtering mode. We can't passively learn. We have to be engaged so that we can pay attention and learn.

On September 10th, 2009 Six Feet Up will host a "Plone Immersive Training Experience" that will take attendees through the hands-on and guided exercise of creating and launching a real Plone site from scratch. The event will be designed to engage participants in real problem-solving activities spanning from the initial Subversion setup and buildout creation, to the stimulating task of skinning a Plone site for multiple platforms and browsers, setup of third-party Plone products, and the final deployment to the production server with the setup of caching rules.

To give meaning to the project and foster attention, attendees will be working on a real Plone project for a non-profit organization of their choosing. Six Feet Up will soon accept applications from world-wide non-profits in needs of a Content Management System and will ask training participants to vote and select which project the Plone Immersive Training Experience is to benefit.

The Plone Immersive Training Experience will take place in Indianapolis, IN, over the course of a little bit less than 3 days, starting on Thursday, Sept. 10th at 9am ET, and ending 60 hours later on Saturday, Sept. 12th at 9pm. During that time participants will literally live, breathe and taste Plone in an instructional setting focused on learning by experience.

Indiana-based Westfield Washington Schools has asked Six Feet Up to help them migrate ten content-managed district and school sites to the latest Plone 3.x. Six Feet Up will upgrade the Plone products, as well as migrate and clean the existing Plone skins. Six Feet Up will also investigate options to simplify the management of all the school sites in order to establish a consistent look and feel. A Plone subsite architecture is currently envisioned as well as the syndication of news and events across all sites.

The Center for Galapagos Studies (CGS), a new joint initiative of research, education, and outreach in the Galapagos Islands (of Ecuador) involving the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) and the Universidad San Francisco de Quito (USFQ), was in need of a content-managed website.
Designed and developed by Six Feet Up, the new CGS website is powered by the open source content management system Plone and provides details on the ongoing research, education, and outreach activities that are part of this initiative. This website also provides a way for faculty and student researchers and collaborating scientists to share information through a password-protected "intranet" section.
The new CGS website is scheduled to launch in February 2009.