Workshop Sessions

PRESENTATION: Plone Deployment Challenges

By: Shay VanVlymen - November 20, 2008

The Plone stack is deeper than just the download you get from plone.org.  Deploying a site requires an examination of your whole environment.  Six Feet Up's Director of Technical Services, Shay VanVlymen, will go over the most common hurdles of launching a Plone site and how to avoid and/or resolve them.  Starting with a solid foundation is paramount to a strong deployment.  Complete analysis of the system, including network architecture, disk subsystems, memory and other aspects of the hardware, is required to ensure maximum application performance.

TUTORIAL 1: HTTP Acceleration & Load Balancing

By: Andrew Parker - November 20, 2008

Plone can power high traffic sites when properly planned.  Choosing the right tools to deliver your content is the key to a scaleable environment.  Six Feet Up's Deployment Expert Andrew Parker will address CacheFu best practices to accelerate the end users' experience. He will demonstrate that small changes have big effects as the default settings are conservative. Load balancing has hidden facets such as session that will dictate the choice of platform.  The included live demo will show a race between two setups: Plone with just Zope on the front-end versus Plone with a ZEO Cluster, Nginx and Squid.

Tutorial 2: Buildout, Eggs & Skillet

By: Clayton Parker - November 20, 2008

In the past, deploying a Zope/Plone application was a cumbersome task wrought with peril.  Buildout has ushered in a new era of repeatability and ease of use. Six Feet Up's Senior Developer Clayton Parker will show you how to use zc.buildout from your local development instance to the full blown production server instance with one buildout.  Buildout leverages Python eggs that allow the project's dependencies to be checked and satisfied at runtime. Once you have the eggs, you need to put them someplace.  We will introduce the idea of a skillet for distributing your own project's eggs for use by your buildouts.

Tutorial 3: Backup Strategies

By: Shay VanVlymen - November 20, 2008

Disaster recovery mitigation is a critical component of any production operation and is often under-funded and under-tested. Six Feet Up's Director of Technical Services, Shay VanVlymen will outline successful plans to design, implement and test backup strategies for the real world. Case studies and common tools such as repozo will be detailed to give attendees a practical understanding of critical backup elements.

Tutorial 4: Alternative Deployment Techniques

By: Calvin Hendryx-Parker - November 20, 2008

Sometimes your projects may have very specific requirements for deployment.  Many times you will integrate a CMS into your already well-established web platform.  Other situations may require complex personalization or e-commerce capabilities, and Plone may not be the best fit for these situations. Why work against Plone when you can take advantage of its native power?  Six Feet Up's Co-Founder and CTO, Calvin Hendryx-Parker, will examine various deployment tools like CMFDeployment, Entransit and Deliverance, and compare their strengths and weaknesses to allow you to merge your Plone managed content with existing infrastructure and provide content contributors with the tools they need.