Monday, June 30, 2008

Learning Machine

Since I've had a lot of free time on my hands lately, I've been exploring all those little things that I've been meeting to catch up on. I started with wanting to learn how to skin Plone. But I realized I didn't have an instance of Plone on my Ubuntu install. I knew I'd have to use the unified installer of Plone and thankfully SteveM wrote a wonderful tutorial that worked like a charm. Half way through the tutorial, I ran into some terminal commands. Sure, pretty simple for most Linux users but this girl is new to all this. Thanks to google, I found a handy tutorial that walked me through command line basics. Cool. My instance of Plone is up and running and working nicely. Next thing to tackle, learn how to skin. I hop over to Limi's tutorial on skinning Plone (not realizing that it isn't up to date for Plone 3 but that's aside the point). Oh look, I have to install a product. Done that before. Oh crap, where's my Products directory in the file system? ugh. Hop into #plone on IRC and got the answer. Ok, install it, restart zope, etc, yay I'm on my way. Oh wait, I don't have a freaking design to use. Crap. Ok, how do I use Gimp? it's pretty simple as a tool, but I need more specific info geared towards websites. Back to googling. Found a lot to pick from but one in particular that was perfect for what I needed. Follow the tutorial, from gimp to html/css. Sweet. Finished and it doesn't look too bad. Plus it was a great refresher for my html/css.
So yeah, now it's on to skinning Plone 3. We'll see how that goes.
Either way, I'm learning all kind of new things and adding to my skill set. Technology is fun!