The first Plone Conference is going to take place at Tulane University in New Orleans from October 15 - 17, 2003. I'm really excited about this, not only because it's great there will be a Plone conference, but because I'm going to be there! :-)

To make things even more exciting for me, I've agreed to do the "Introduction to Python for Plone developers" tutorial on the morning of the opening day, right after Plone co-founder Alexander Limi does the opening "Customising Plone's Look and Feel" tutorial. I'm really excited about this, and obviously I want to do the best job I can of getting Python newbies up to speed. I'm qualified to give this tutorial because I'm a Python newbie too. ;-)

I'll take a cue from Brent to prepare. The best way to find out what attendees want is to listen to them. Like Brent says, the users know best. :-) Of course, I have to be prepared ahead of time, I can't just adlib it, so I need to know beforehand -- as soon as possible, actually. So I'm going to try to pull this information from the community, passively and actively.

I also want to invite you (yes, you) to the Plone conference. If you have any interest in Plone, Zope, Python or Content Management in general, the value for the money here is unbeatable in my opinion. Only $50 for two days of talks, and optionally $150 for a full day of tutorials. With the lineup that is prepared, this is sure to be a success. And remember, Plone runs great on Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, BSD and more, so this applies to just about everyone.

Oh, I also want to give props to Mark, my boss, for ponying up to be a Gold Sponsor for this event. That rocks, it really shows our dedication to this platform, and it's cool to be able to say I work for a Gold Sponsor. :-)