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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