Such social network as Facebook can serve a good tool for engaging with more people. Plone presence on a world's favourite social media helps making conversations between existing and prospective Plone members much easier and closer.

We at Quintagroup have recently created 2 pages representing Quintagroup and Plone Themes we develop for Plone sites. The reason for creating such pages is to get people more engaged and motivated in taking part in conversations about Plone. You are welcomed to become our fan today and help us spread Plone.

There are a lot of other pages and groups on Facebook, devoted to uniting fans of Plone and people around it. You can join any group that is of interest for you. I've tried to roughly divide Plone groups on Facebook into the following categories:

Plone Users Groups

Members of different Plone users groups create their own Facebook groups to unite and get more communication between the members. These are such groups as Plone Italian User Group, Plone Indonesia User Group,  Boston Plone Users Group, New York Plone Users Group, Plone Ukrainian Users Group, Grupo de Usuarios de Plone en México etc.

Plone Events

There are usually special groups created for occasions such as Plone Conferences, Symposiums or World Plone Days: Plone Conference 2009 Budapest, European Plone Symposium 2009, European Plone Symposium 2010, Plone Symposium East, Plone Symposium South America, and World Plone Day.

Plone Providers

Plone providers also try to find their place on Facebook by creating pages/public profiles for sharing ideas, business and products with Facebook users. See pages of such popular Plone providers as: Groundwire (former ONE/Northwest), Redomino, Abstract, Pilot Systems, Six Feet Up, Zea Partners and Quintagroup.

Other

You can also find groups according to your special interest in Plone. There is a group for Plone 3.0 user group and for Plone Developers. Insterested in Plone Tune-up events? Join Plone Tune-Up Rallies group and you are there. Even girls in Plone have their own PloneChix group.

As you can see there is a place for everyone! So, don't step aside but join us and help us enlarge the Plone community today.

So, I can say that screencasting in Linux can be as easy as screencasting in any other operating system. The most difficult issue is to select the most suitable software among many and many available applications. In any case, I prefer using free open-source applications, so my search for suitable software was limited to free applications.

After dozens of videos recorded I learned one of the important lessons and here it is: Tip 1: Record audio and video streams separately. What this gives me is the control over 2 streams which I can edit, clean, and finetune. Besides, in this case synchronization issues do not emerge, and I have no problems with making audio and video synchronized.

The principle of my recording screencasts was the following: I recorded video and audio streams separately, then I edited and cleaned them. After that I combined them into a single video which I later uploaded into YouTube.

Step 1. Capture Video Stream

For video capturing I used qt-RecordMyDesktop that is a fine desktop session recorder for Linux. Even though RecordMyDesktop allows recording both video and audio streams, I preferred capturing video stream only (to disable audio recording make sure 'Sound Quality' box is not checked).

With 'Select Window' button I selected the necessary window to make the recordings within. With hitting the 'Record' button I launched screen capturing. The important note worth mentioning here is the size of the window to record. If you want to upload your screencasts to YouTube and want them to be recognized as High Definition (HD) videos, make sure to keep the recommended aspect ratio, and video resolution that should be 16:9. So, Tip 2: While recording video stream keep to the recommended window size proportion - 16:9. In my case I recorded within Firefox web browser window that was 1270 px width, so the height of the window was 714 px (1270 to 714 is the same proportion as 16 to 9).

As a result of the recording I got out.ogv file, which I had to convert to a suitable format for subsequent work. What I used for this purpose was a mencoder, I run the following command in the terminal to convert my .ogv file to .avi:

mencoder out.ogv -o out.avi -ovc lavc

where out.ogv - is the input file, recorded with RecordMyDesktop, out.avi - output file needed for future word, -ovc lavc - is the the codec used for conversion.

Step 2. Record Audio Stream

To record the audio path I used Audacity sound editor. I usually open the video file in the background and while it is played I record audio stream for it. This gives me an understanding about how long the audio should be and this is how I can make my audio and video streams synchronized.

Audacity is a good application for making audio stream clean and distinct. It allows to get rid of the background noise that is usually recorded but it makes the audio sound a bit 'dirty'. Tip 3: Always try to minimize background noise while recording, if it still bothers you - use a good sound editor like Audacity to get rid of it. Here are the instruction how to do this:

• Select a piece of the audio with no voice, only the background noise.
• Go to Effect -> Noise Removal -> Click on Get Noise Profile
• Select the whole audio stream and again go to Effect -> Noise Removal and press OK.
  

Now listen to what you've got now. Sounds better, doesn't it? What is left to do is to export this audio track in the .wav format.

Step 3. Combine a video with an audio track

The final step of the screencast making is to combine video and audio steams into a single video file. For this I used Avidemux application. Simply open necessary video .avi file, add the audio stream at Audio -> Main Track, and insert the External WAV (the one recorded with Audacity).

Now that our video is complete - save this video at File -> Save -> Save Video. That is it! The screencast is ready for the upload to YouTube!

Here is the video tutorial about making screencasts in Linux using applications mentioned above:

So, our brand-new office room. It is located in the same building as the old one, but one stage higher. We're separated now but still close enough. :) Space, glorious space! Big and light room with 10 working places and a cozy kitchen-restroom. 

You might have see our new office room, as we celebrated World Plone Day 2009 there. But then, 1 month from now it lacked furniture and green plants; now it is all packed. Everything on its place and everybody at their working desks.

So, thanks to everyone who worked hard so that now we can arrive everyday to this pleasant place!

• The first chapter Plone Site Description has some new screenshots added to compare Plone 2.x and Plone 3.0.x Personal and Task bars. 
• Plone 2.5.x Smart Folder (Topic) is now called Collection in Plone 3.
• Navigation Settings were divided and now Navigation portlet can be configured in 'Manage Portlets' -> 'Navigation Portlet', in earlier versions it was possible to do it done in 'Site Setup' -> 'Navigation Settings'.
• Plone portlets has new way of management, without need to do it through ZMI.
• Plone footer can be edited in ZMI, but at different location: it moved from plone_skins -> plone_templates to portal_view_customization.
• Article about Multilingual Plone Site creation - Language setting can now be found at different location as well: if in Plone 2.x everything was at Site Setup -> Language Settings, now they can be reached at ZMI -> portal_languages.

• Every text field is clickable, thus - editable, i.e. it became much easier and less time-consuming to make changes. It's pretty nice that I can now click on any part of a document to do a quick update, correct a spelling error or do changes to any field in events items. There is no need now to reload the whole page to make corrections — simply edit it directly by clicking on it.
• Versioning support - one click on History green tab takes me to the full history of a document edits, as simply as that. Edit notes can be put down after every page edit so that to remind yourself what particularly have been done. Even if no notes were left, there is a nice tool Comparing to other revision that clearly displays all the changes done, in different colors for better orientation. It is possible to revert to an earlier version of the document if needed, just by clicking on the corresponding version. All the old versions are kept together, called "working copies", and can be reached any time. Isn't it amazing? No more numerous undoes! 
• Plone 3.0 comes with a a new portlet architecture, more capable and higher performance portlets engine. There is no need to shift to Zope interface any longer to set any portlets you need. Everything is done simply and easily in Plone interface. This is especially convenient when setting portlets for a particular folder, different from what are there in the parent one. On the left and right side of every page there is a link to Manage portlets page.
• WYSIWYG editor working here is new version of Kupu - 1.4, that has lots of new features implemented.
• Plone 3.0 checks links and references, preventing potential link breakage. In case you want to remove any item from the site, Plone checks whether this item has been linked to from somewhere else. If this turns to be a working item, a warning appears, telling that this item is used somewhere, and that items you are attempting to delete may cause links in the site to break. There is even a listing of the documents that will get a broken link. I think that is a great idea to have this feature developed and implemented, getting rid of the risk of having broken links!
• Sharing permissions have been also changed - now it is easy to control who has access to the content, who can add, edit, view, or review it.

• In Insert Tables with Kupu chapter information about paragraph styles was added, namely paragraph styles within tables are now available. Kupu allows setting paragraph styles within table cells. Different paragraph style can be set for every separate table cell. This new feature of Kupu is nicely described here.
• There is a new anchor drawer which lets you create tables of contents for the current document, or simply link within the document. This renewed drawer is displayed and explained in How to Create FAQ Page with Kupu. What is more, management of anchors is now advanced: Kupu 1.4 allows creating and deleting anchors without directly creating links.
• Internal and external link drawers also support linking to anchors within the remote documents. Thus, Insert Internal Link chapter has been updated, as well as Insert External Link, that was enlarged with an example about embedding external objects to the page, i.e. some support was added for inserting Flash content.
• Image captioning now has a customizable template. Kupu insert image properties  explains how to configure default image size.
• Kupu now has a 'Save' button available straight near the rest buttons. More information about this can be found here.

This time the thing is about Kupu paragraph styles. In case you need to change the size of letters or their color in Kupu WYSIWYG editor and you know that preferable way to do it is with the help of new paragraph styles. But how to do it correctly, so that generated HTML code does not have its specific bad tags.

The answer to this question you may find in How to add a new style to Kupu Paragraph Styles - a newly added chapter of Plone book. This article is devoted to adding new styles to Kupu, that can definitely give much better look to your content.

Kupu chapter has recently been enlarged by an article concerning Kupu Toolbar Customization, in addition to this two articles about how to insert different content types into Plone site were published: Insert External Link and Insert Tables with Kupu.

If you are still unsure what is happening with HTML code read HTML filter, so to familiarize yourself with filters available for HTML code validation.
Another new article is How to Edit Footer. And the ways of organizing a navigation tree and navigation tabs on Plone site are described in Navigation on a Plone-site.

With the help of Kupu Resource Types internal links to different content types may be created: these may be a simple linkable object, collection of them and even a link to the exact part of the document (if it contains anchors) can be created.

on plone.org. This tutorial consists of several articles about text editors, that are frequently used in Plone (Kupu, Epoz, and FCK editor), their peculiarities, the way content can be edited with their help.

There is a description of the toolbars and icons in Kupu, of the options available for inserting images with Kupu. One article is an illustration of how to create FAQ page with this WYSIWYG editor. Besides, we tried to throw some light on what ResolveUID is.

This tutorial consists of articles taken from Plone Book for Content Managers. This Plone book has lately been expanded by description of Plone site, we also tried to explain with the help of clear illustration what default Plone page consists of, and which Plone Portlets are available. Two article appeared about how to Add content in Plone and what can be achieved with the help of Display View option.

You can find qSiloGroup product description on qSiloGroup page.

Multilingual site can be organized in different ways, what we chose is:
English version was put into the root of the site - http://www.offshorecompany.com/
then we create a folder 'ru' - a Russian version of the site - http://www.offshorecompany.com/ru
In 'ru' folder the content was translated but the shortnames remained the same as in English version.

The difficulties that appeared were:

• when a root Folder was translated with LinguaPlone, the translated version was automatically put into the root. What we had to do was to cut the translated version and to paste it into 'Ru' folder. Than the problem with shortnames emerged. Shortnames were generated automatically on the basis of their titles. And with every Folder, Page and Form mailer this problem remained - we had to rename all the shortnames to make them the same as in the root.

  http://www.offshorecompany.com/company/
  http://www.offshorecompany.com/ru/company/  

• when a Page from initially translated folder was translated, it was put into the corresponding translated folder in 'Ru', so the only difficulty with it was to rename the shortname for every page.

  http://www.offshorecompany.com/company/strategy.asp
  http://www.offshorecompany.com/ru/company/strategy.asp

• PloneFormMailers had to be copied, as they failed to be translated at once. That's why we doubled them, and only after that it became possible to translate form mailers.

Meta tags on translated pages were changed with the help of Plone SEO product.