Attendees:

Troy Brown - Illinois

Steve Gregory - Colorado

Darci Hanning - Oregon

Hollly Gordon, Kathleen Krause-Thompson,Tine Walczyk - Texas

1. Reports from the States

Illinois - Troy:

• Currently have 45 sites live, and 25 more almost ready.  Preparing for hosting IL Plinkit Conference soon.

Colorado - Steve:

• Colorado is up to 21 live sites. They are down 3 key staff members and are currently looking for Plinkit staff members.
• Steve has been adding the Library ROI Calculator to templates and is looking into writing an installation script for the calculator.

Oregon - Darci:

• Oregon is continuing to add 2-3 sites per month.
• Daci reported a change this change to OR's MOU: If the library is going to have a Plinkit site, this will be the library's only site. There has been an issue with The Library Corporation (TLC) that provides an entire web presense, rather than just an OPAC. Sirsi "Rooms" enhancement, that provides content to the OPAC, might also confuse patrons.
• New content has been added to the OR template related to elections.

Texas - Tine:

• Texas is adding 1-2 sites per month, and currently has 50+ sites
• Tine presented on Plinkit at the TLA conference. There were 50 participants and a few general questions came up:

     1) Can there be a Plinkit version for the school/public library? Darci reported that as long as an organization is defined as a library there is not restriction on having a Plinkit site.

     2) How expandable is Plinkit? How many libraries can participate before it gets unbearably slow? There was some discussion on caching, etc.  See more on this later in these minutes.

• Texas reported that there has been no luck on repairing the PIL problem or with migrating to the new server, due to problems with their contractor (IBM)
• Many of the URLs on the Plinkit template need to be updated, so TX is redoing their template.

2. Topics

Caching

Steve asked about what people are doing about Plone 2.1.4 caching. He has been experimenting with Cache Fu. Troy reported that they run Zope on high ports and do caching through Squid (instead of Apache). Darci reported that Oregon has not been doing any cache modifications, though they have 40 sites on one Zope instance.  She recommended folks do a web search on "Joel Burton + Performance" for information on caching and performance tuning. Steve recommended Cache Fu for Plone 2.1. Cache Fu manages how headers are written. They are using Cache Fu for a couple of sites. A good testing tool for what makes Plone 2.1 slow is Firebug. You can profile each page. Darci said to make sure that in the ZMI, the Portal CSS is not in debug mode, as this will really slow things down. Troy suggested Deadlock Debugger can also by used for profiling. Another thing to check if there is a slowdown is RSS feeds -- these can hang up trying to get content, and the time-out is very long.

Calendar

Troy said that recurring events on the calendar is the biggest complaint that he gets. Darci reported that she has setup a test server and is working with Andy on this. Other products to look into might be Dateable. There will be a "Calendar Sprint" going on During the upcoming Plone conference (October in DC) and they will be working on recurring events for Plone 3.0.

3. Report from the Steering Committee

• A 1/4 time person has been approved and selected and will start on July 1. Project coordinators need to develop an orientation plan and a 6-12 months work plan for this person.
• IMLS announcement about other states (???)
• Next Steering Committee Meeting will be May 30.

4. Project Coordinators Meeting

• Tine will schedule a meeting to happen before May 30.

5. Status of Plinkit 2.0

• Darci reported that things are pretty close, but Colorado's and Illinois's test sites aren't there, and she is still playing phone tag with Joel Burton.
• Darci will be meeting the tech writer next week about the process of updating the documentation as soon as 2.0 is ready.

6. Outstanding Items

• Steve has worked through the skin tutorials and recommends them. He will send the URLs for both sites (original and sequel).
• Darci has put together the layout skin with different color schemes.
• Holly requested that Steve post his notes about the Library ROI Calculator and how to install it on the Plinkit Collaboration Website.
• Steve is looking into bootcamp training. Darci suggested contacting PLOT or PLOW, other library projects. Local support groups typically sponsor the bootcamps. Touch base with Joel about training. There is also the possibililty of online training with Richard Ammerman. There will be a Plone Conference in D.C. October 7, 8, and 9.  Monday and Tuesday will consist of training.

7. Next Meeting of the Technical Group will be May 23.