Topics and Goals
Training
On Saturday morning we began with some training to introduce sprint newbies to the process and ensure everyone had the proper setup. We got everyone's buildout up-and-running (see Setup Instructions) and went over how to use XDV (for those working on the theme project).
Theming with collective.xdv
Proposal: Several people have expressed interest in developing some theme products using XDV. We were thinking we could take a number of Open Source Web Designs and see if we could port the themes over to Plone. What we are looking for are themes that would be appropriate for education, government, non-profit organizations.
A list of themes already packaged for Plone is at:
Some possible sources for themes to port over can be found at the following websites:
- http://www.oswd.org/
- http://www.openwebdesign.org/
- http://www.opendesigns.org/
- http://opensourcetemplates.org/
Participants:
- Michael Miller
- Michael Takahashi
- Albert Wu
- Michael Duggan
- Trish Ang
- Tyler Randles
Outcome: forthcoming.
FSD Simplifier
Proposal: An extender for FacultyStaffDirectory that makes the Person objects more user-friendly. It would hide/clean-up some of the unneeded options for ordinary users. Some things it might do:
- Hide unwanted schemata (like User Settings, categorization, dates, ownership, settings)
- Hide unwanted tabs (like Contents, Sharing, History)
- Disable access to the dashboard / default Plone user profile
- Let users show/hide their own profile
- Let admins lock a profile to prevent users from editing
- Allow ability to turn these features on/off through site setup
Participants:
- Heather Wozniak
- Alec Mitchell
- Luke Brannon
- Warren Leung (observer)
Outcome: Released a package on Pypi, collective.fsdsimplifier, that provides several of these features.
Improvements to Plone Software Center
Proposal: Make Plone Software Center more user-friendly by modifying layout, including content ratings, listing releases in an easy-to-read table, and returning one result per project.
Participants:
- Elizabeth Leddy
- Alice Tseng-Planas
- Edward Soong
Outcome: forthcoming.
Other Topics
These topics were suggested, but we didn't have time to work on them. They'd be good for future sprints or user group meetings.
Training
- How to use SVN
Breaking in Plone (Training Issues & Example Content Kits)
So you have an awesome PLONE instance set up and a slick template in place ... now what? Topics and help kits to help you commence the test-drive while keeping your community of "content contributors" happy and your site in-tact.
- Developing "community specific" example content kits ( K-12, College Department, Community Collab Project, Student Portfolio)
- Plone 3 UI Omni-Graffle Templates
- Templates and Kits for Training, Slides, Docs, & Sandboxes
- Class-group management Tools
NOTE: We should take a look at collective.amberjack to see if it would be useful for this topic. Amberjack is a tool for creating a step by step introduction or tutorial.
Suggested by:
- Alice Tseng-Planas. Been in Plone 3.0 Training land for the last 12 months and have some of these tools up for myself already but interested in breaking them out to modular format and sharing best practice so I can roll them out faster.
- Edward Soong - I am a newbie too, been learning Plone for the last 18 months, interested to see your templates.
Ploneboard Bonus Pack
Create an extender to add additional functionality to Ploneboard and/or PloneboardNotify. These might include:
- Additional workflows for forums, such as Admin-only posting, Admin-only posting and viewing, Member-only posting moderated, and others
- Improvements to the notification email template
- Ability to configure the notification email template
- Ability to subscribe / opt-in to notifications if they are not already flagged as mandatory
- Ability to post to the board by sending an email (use mailtoplone?)
- Other ideas?
The goal would be to make Ploneboard into a more full-featured discussion tool with improved email capabilities, so that it might even be used in place of a listserv.
Suggested by:
- Heather Wozniak
Spotlight Slideshow Product
Using open source jquery tools to build an automatic rotating picture slideshow with URL links to each picture and port over as a Plone product. We may examine the following and :
- Check out popular jquery applications that other people have built and offered as open source
- Utilize one of these jquery app and together with css and html to create a slideshow with individual pictures that are URL linkable
- Apply paster theming template principles to make it as an installable product for Plone 3
- The slideshow is to appear on abovecontentbody area
- Other ideas?
The goal is to make a slideshow that highlights departments services or events or news, to draw in a viewer's attention, and at the same time help make a Plone page attractive and eye-catching.
Suggested by:
- Edward Soong
A Page That Interacts with Remote Database (Material Reservation System)
A page that user can enter some data, then the data is compared with an external database table, such as MySQL, retrieves additional data related to that person. With the additional data, reserve items and submit. This is a project in concept. I am not certain of all the parts necessary to make it work, but it is interesting. Here's what we may have to do:
- Apply database modules in Plone such as z sql methods, z mysql connection
- Apply external methods to Python scripts
- Using page template and may be TAL to create page forms or using PloneFormGen
- Create sample tables in MySQL
- Other ideas?
The application idea here is for an instructor to enter their info on a web page, the data is compared against an external database, retrieves the instructor's courses that he/she is teaching for the quarter, also listing teaching materials that the instructor can reserve, such as classroom, projector, film material, etc. The goal is to achieve a web page interface easy for instructors to reserve their teaching material needs in one place.
Suggested by:
- Edward Soong
