I complained to servage that my site had got a bit slow and they offered to move me to their newest cluster. Apologies for any interruptions in service. It seems to be much faster now, plus I now have native (rather than CGI) support for php5, which is handy because I am trying out ActiveCollab. The move seemed to be fairly seamless - I didn't have to move any of my own files or restore any databases so i'm a happy customer again.

I am really pleased to say that the Plone Skinning presentation last night was a success! About 30 local web designers/developers and people interested in using Plone turned up - a much higher attendance than my previous "Plone Demo" talk. I used the Plone S5 product to create a simple set of slides with a few bullet points to keep me from jumping around too much, but it was mostly a hands on presentation demonstrating a bit of basic customisation via the ZMI, then the process for creating a filesystem based skin.

I ran plone locally and used dreamweaver (in code view with large fonts) to do ZPT editing to keep things familiar for those designers who may be scared by the idea of terminals and Emacs!

I also tried to dispell the "all plone sites look the same" myth by taking a random design I had knocked up as a static html page and inserting the minimum possible ZPT markup to make it function as a front end plone main template rendering the body content and portlets (with none of the plone CSS).

The Q&A was really good - it ranged from basic questions about templating to "can plone do....?" type questions. I think I managed to field them all fairly well - i'll have to wait to see the video (coming soon) to listen back for any clangers I may have made. I was disappointed however that all the free beer had gone by the end of the Q&A - a conspiracy maybe? "psstt... keep Rick talking while we drink all the beer - ask him if there is a cow-milking module available...".

The event was sponsored by Knowledge West (room/projector hire/buffet) and beer kindly provided by Team Rubber.

I have volunteered to give another Plone related skillswap at the Watershed in Bristol (UK), on 16th January. The previous one (a general plone demo) went down well, and this time I am going to cover the basics of skinning a plone site, from basic Through The Web (TTW) customisation, to creating an installable skin product. I think it will be streamed live - check here for details. If you are in the Bristol area come along (it's free)!

I am going to rig up a device that gives me an electric shock every time I say the word "umm..", to train me up abit better for this public speaking lark..