Hello and introduction

["Alexander Limi" <limi plone org>]

Hi gnome-web,

Just wanted to send a short introductory message and congratulate you on  
choosing Plone for your new web project.

I'm Alexander Limi, one of the co-founders of the Plone project — and I  
have also worked a brief stint for Canonical (who employs a lot of GNOME  
people). My company Plone Solutions is responsible for the multilingual  
component in Plone called LinguaPlone. I also recently accepted a position  
at Google as a User Interface Designer, starting later this month.

In any case, I wanted to say that we'll do our best to guide you, help out  
with conceptual questions, and hopefully a little bit on the  
implementation front too (but I don't want to become a bottleneck — I have  
an open source project to run — so I won't promise any work personally  
outside of the guidance :).

I see that David Convent has already offered to assist you on the theming  
part, David is a long-time contributor to Plone, and is a dependable and  
talented guy who can be trusted with Plone decisions and advice. Martin  
Aspeli is another person you'll probably see chiming in here, he's also a  
respected and very skilled coder and community organizer.

I think the most value we can give you is some experience in what works  
and what doesn't, how to approach various deliverables (like scaling down  
the interface to fit your use case). Plone can be incredibly complex and  
confusing in the start, and I hope we can accelerate your understanding  
and help make Plone into the tool you need for your website needs.

Another thing that I believe is of great value is to help you avoid badly  
implemented add-ons (or "products" in Plone-speak). There is a significant  
number of add-on products out there (over 500 at last count), and a lot of  
them are not implemented with maintainability, extensibility or  
scalability in mind.

Later on, we should be able to give some advice on performance and  
caching, which is Plone's achilles heel if not set up properly. Plone does  
a lot out-of-the-box, and needs an efficient cache system in front, as  
well as proper setup on the server to give you the performance you expect.  
Luckily, we have a lot of experience in doing that too. :)

I'll stop here, I'm sure we'll get into the details later. I just want you  
to know that we're out there, and will do whatever we can to help you in  
the process of building your new web site. Thanks for the vote of  
confidence in choosing Plone, let's make sure you get what you want and  
need!

--
_____________________________________________________________________

     Alexander Limi · Chief Architect · Plone Solutions · Norway

 Consulting · Training · Development · http://www.plonesolutions.com
_____________________________________________________________________

      Plone Co-Founder · http://plone.org · Connecting Content
  Plone Foundation · http://plone.org/foundation · Protecting Plone