The TOPP Talks Template is S5 with a custom theme (thanks Carly!) intended to help you focus on the talking and make attractive, readable slides for your TOPP Talk with as little muss and fuss as possible.  You can view the template here if you just want to see what it looks like.

Making a Talk (the Mile-High View) ­

1. Copy the template to a new folder, hopefully with a nice name that shows what your talk is about.
2. Edit template.html (you can rename it if you like) and add your own content.
3. Upload your presentation so you're not the only one who can see it.

It's that easy!  Read on for some elaboration if that's not enough to get you going.

Copying the Template

TOPP Talks presentations are hosted in TOPP svn under https://svn.openplans.org/svn/presentations/topp-talks/s5-slides/  (feel free to stick code samples, etc. up there as well if it's useful to your talk).  Using the command-line SVN client, you can copy the template and check out your copy with the following commands:

svn cp https://svn.openplans.org/svn/presentations/topp-talks/s5-slides/ https://svn.openplans.org/svn/presentations/topp-talks/s5-slides/myslideshow/;
svn co https://svn.openplans.org/svn/presentations/topp-talks/s5-slides/myslideshow/
­

Now you have a full slideshow in a directory called myslideshow; you should be able to view it locally and have all the nice S5 features.  Remember to use svn mv if you want to rename template.html!

(Editor's note: Feel free to add instructions for other SVN clients here!)

Editing Your Slides

One nice thing about S5 is that an S5 slideshow is just an HTML document, so you can edit it in the text or HTML editor of your choice.  The template slideshow is intended to provide a demo of some typical formatting for slideshows (that's what View Source is for in your web browser, after all!) but for more detail we'll refer you to the S5 homepage.

Uploading Your Slides

Assuming you used the command-line client as listed above, you can upload your slides by running

svn commit myslideshow

Again, instructions for other SVN clients are welcome.