Re: Ideas for "EduPlone"

On Tuesday, May 27, 2003, at 01:25 PM, tshooter91 wrote:

> What are we going to call this thing anyway?  *grin*
>
> Along with what Tom blogged I've been thinking of the following:
>
I should point out that I've already done some work in this direction, 
with a product I call Tuttle:  http://zope.org/Members/hoffman/tuttle

There is a little explanation on the Product page.  The most important 
thing to realize is that Tuttle really only has an administrative 
interface (the ZMI).  It creates standard roles, lets you add teachers 
and students, and create rosters and schedules.  That's about it.

On our server, Plone sits inside Tuttle and inherits the users and 
roles set up in Plone (doesn't actually do much with them yet, but...). 
  Probably the Tuttle machinery should be grafted more directly into 
Plone now, but I'm not sure what the most proper way to fit that into 
the Plone architecture would be.

> ***Possible new Roles(already discussed some here)
> Student
> Teacher/Faculty
> Parent
> Administration
> School Board/ Board of Regents

Zope products aren't supposed to define new roles (as a point of 
style).  However, we'll probably have to do it anyhow.

> ***Areas for each site
> I don't know how it could be best accomplished but a site for each 
> school in a school district or each college for a university would be 
> good.  The content here would be managed by people at the school.  
> Maybe people who work in a few of the different schools would be able 
> to contribute to both sites.  This brings up the next idea.

They can just get separate Plone instances--possibly on the same server 
if that was desirable.  I wouldn't get too hung up on this aspect.

> ***Groups as well as roles for members.
> Maybe there's already a way to do this, but I'm thinking of a 
> situation where there is a group for a class called Journalism.  The 
> Teacher and all students are part of this group.  The Students can 
> submit news and event articles for the Journalism group, or even for a 
> particular folder where their school news is kept, and the Teacher is 
> able to publish those articles because she has the Teacher role AND 
> she's in the group.  The science teacher may be able to publish for 
> students is his Science 101 group, but not any Journalism content.  In 
> these cases both the Role and the Group would have to be satisfied.
>
Well you can probably do what you want if you create a class called 
AClass (or whatever) which has a teacher ID properties and a roster of 
student id's as a list property.  You wouldn't want to go so far as to 
introduce UNIX style groups.  You'll find yourself in some very long 
tedious conversations if you want to do that (see the Zope 3 list 
conversations on security if you don't believe me).  The workflow is 
the tricky bit, because my understanding is that standard CMF workflow 
can only be directed at roles, not individuals.  That's somewhere where 
a more heavy duty CMF geek needs to give us some guidance.

> ***Viewing news/events relevant to the member...
> There's probably a way to do this now, but it should be made clear and 
> possibly more customized to an educational setting.  I'd like the 
> calendar on the High School website to show events pertaining to the 
> High School only.  The teacher at the High School should see the 
> events for the H.S. only.  A teacher that works at the H.S. and the 
> Middle School should see a personal calendar with both H.S. and Middle 
> School events.  Same with news.
>
Again, the cross-school stuff doesn't seem like a high priority to me, 
but rather something like bringing up the news for classes that are 
relevant to a given student.  It would be best to focus on generating 
useful RSS feeds, so that news between schools could be shared even if 
they weren't using Plone.

--Tom



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