Announcing deliveranceproject.org, a new home for Deliverance

At the CMSExpo 2010 conference in Chicago, Chris Johnson from ifPeople asked me what URL to give people who were interested in learning more about Deliverance.

I was embarrassed to say that there wasn’t really a good landing page – the page on coactivate.org was outdated, and the Deliverance documentation was not exactly very welcoming to a newcomers.

I had registered the domain name deliveranceproject.org awhile ago and even had my brother Luke put together this logo you see to the right.

I was intending to make the site a showcase of Deliverance itself, bringing the documentation, mailing list archive, code repository and Trac site under a single umbrella with a unified theme using Deliverance.

But as my colleague Aaron likes to say, “The perfect is the enemy of the good enough,” and I never launched the site because it wasn’t ready.  So I pinged Aaron in the morning of the first day of the conference and said, “How quickly can you whip up a static page for deliveranceproject.org”. He said 1 hr, and one hour later, deliveranceproject.org was born! Thanks Aaron for the quick turnaround. Chris Johnson quickly updated his slides to include this URL, as did I.

DeliveranceProject.org

The site is purposely a very simple one-page of information with links and a couple embedded presentations. Eventually we may expand it to have more examples and showcase what cool things you can do with Deliverance, but for now it serves it’s purpose: a place to direct you to other resources.

I also have Aaron to thank for his expertly prepared slides about Deliverance which he put together for World Plone Day Boston, and which I re-purposed for my talk at CMSExpo, with a few extra easter eggs thrown in.  Here are the slides:

There’s also a video that I recorded on my Nexus One using Qik. I’m not really sure why the video is rotated, but hopefully your neck won’t get strained too much.

I think we were somewhat successful in spreading the good news about Deliverance to the conference goers, especially the non-Plone people from the Drupal, Joomla! and WordPress communities. A couple guys who were in my session said it was the highlight of the conference for them, and another guy said that learning about Deliverance saved him $9,000 that he otherwise would have had to pay an outside consultant to build a Plone theme add-on.

Deliverance training opportunity

If you’re interested in learning more about using Deliverance to theme your Plone site, or any site for that matter, I’ll be teaching a class right before the Plone Symposium East conference on May 24. There are still spots left, so if you want to take your theming knowledge to the next level, register today for the class.

Take my class on monday and then go to Chrissy’s theming Plone or Steve McMahon’s Javascript, jQuery and jQuery Tools classes on tuesday and wednesday, or Tres and Chris class on WSGI. See all the excellent training classes that are offered at very reasonable prices.