Re: Website for local university

hi dan,

also - thank you for you interest in zope/plone! 

Dan Meeking wrote:

> I'm involved in a project to redevelop a website for a University's
> Business School.
> 
> We've almost confirmed the decision to use Zope, and possibly Plone as a
> starting point.  The internal IT staff are very excited about Open
> Source and Zope, although they have zero in-house experience.

that's the reason why external companies can help you to build the knowledge
inside your organisation. quite a lot of companies organised themselves
under the name "eduplone". i've written just one posting earlier some
sentences on this.

> So I'm wondering if anyone can provide some guidance and maybe lend some
> experience from past projects.  Initially, we are only going to be
> building their public website.  No Intranet, no e-learning for the
> students as this is currently handled campus-wide by Blackboard.  The
> project is conceptually quite simple: A public site maintained by 30 or
> so departmental secretaries.  The current site is maintained by the same
> group of people and Dreamweaver.

if you want a light at the end of the tunnel ;-) we can export content from
Plone and will be able import content from blackboard in the IMS-Content
Package format quite soon.

> I'm torn between using Plone as a starting point or simply Zope with the
> CMF.
> 
> Plone is nice, but would have to be tweaked significantly.  The
> navigation and design would require a major rework, but that's not the
> part that concerns me.  Plone is really geared towards a portal
> environment where all the site's visitors are potentially contributors.
>   In the case of this project, we have only a handful (maybe 30)
> contributors, but a whole world of visitors.
> 
> Does anyone have any experience in "transforming" Plone to better
> support this sort of environment?

what's the problem with this environment?
- there are enough skinning experts to change the look completely.
- the "community-plone" is just the default, but it can be customized in
almost any way you can think of.

> If I start with a naked install of Zope and the CMF I'm scared that the
> work required to build in the approval workflow, visual editors, etc may
> be daunting.

that sounds like re-inventing the wheel!
believe me. you don't want to do this :)

> 
> My experience with Zope is very limited - lots of reading and some work
> with tutorials.  I'm really hoping that some kind soul out there can
> lend a hand.  Any kind souls out there?  Any similar projects out there
> that we could  use as a starting point?  Any tips at all?
> 
> As a bit of an aside, does anyone know of a Zope application that is
> geared towards this scenario?  Almost all of the applications I've seen
>   (eg, Plone) are geared towards the Portal situation.  I'm baffled that
> there aren't polished applications to facilitate the maintenance of
> public sites.  I have to believe that there are more projects of the
> "public site" nature than there are of the "portal" nature!  Can anyone
> shed light on this for me?  What am I missing?

dan, a last question, where are you located? 

don't hesitate to contact us if you need more information.

kind regards

jodok

-- 
jodok batlogg
solution2u.net gmbh . hof 4 . a-6861 alberschwende
fon +43 5579 85777-65 . fax -77 . mobil +43 699 11841546
http://solution2u.net/ . batlogg(at)solution2u(dot)net

have a nice day 



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