Learning Lab Denmark wants to sponsor Plone development projects

I've been "lurking" on this list for quite some time now and thought it's
about time that I introduce myself and the organization I work for, Learning
Lab Denmark (LLD). LLD is a relatively new research institution funded by
the Danish government. Our vision is to focus on and expand public awareness
of the role of learning in our collective transition to the knowledge
society. We aim to do this by creating new paths of research in close
dialogue with experimental practice.

My name is Nate Aune and my official job title at LLD is "Information
Broker". My primary responsibility managing the IT systems, including the
website and content management system (CMS). After using a proprietary and
not very user-friendly CMS, I came across Plone and have since directed most
of my energy to learning how it works and recommending it for use at LLD.

However, before we can switch from the existing CMS to Plone, we need to
invest some time and resources into developing Plone further to meet our
requirements. Two of the most important:

1) As we need all of our content to be in both Danish and English, one very
critical feature is support for bilingual content. While the i18nlayer is a
good start, we need to have a complete solution.

2) Another feature that we are very interested in seeing built into Plone is
support for Zope Topic Maps (ZTM), as developed by Creuna.no. While keywords
in Plone provide some association capabilities, again, we need a more robust
solution.

As Alexander Limi, Maik Jablonski, Marco Federighi, and Stian Danenbarger
from Crena.no. and others on this list have mentioned, Topic Maps would be
an incredible addition to Plone, but also one that requires competent
developers and sponsorship.

We would like to hear from other universities and research institutions who
would be willing to co-sponsor such a project. Marco Federighi from the
University College London has already expressed his interest, but I think if
we want to see ZTM in Plone, we need to join forces and direct some funds
towards this effort.

Below I list the other requirements for which we seek assistance and/or
partners. If you are developer and wish to bid on any of these projects, or
if you are a university or educational institution with similar requirements
and interested in co-sponsoring the development of these features (esp.
multilingual content and Topic Maps), please contact me (email: nate at
lld.dk).

Nate Aune
Information Broker
Learning Lab Denmark
http://www.lld.dk


MULTILINGUAL CONTENT
--------------------
Although our site in targeted primarily to the native Danish public, we also
aspire to be an international research institution and therefore, all of our
content is translated to English for publication on our website.

Must have features:
- Language switcher between Danish and English
- Each piece of content has only one instance and ID. User should not have
to make two content objects (one for each language) and fill in language
independent fields twice.
- Language selection should be manual, not automatic by browser setting
- Search results only return pages in the language that is currently
selected
- User interface and slot's text changes to reflect the new language when it
is changed

"Nice to have" features:
- Multilingual URLs; For example, both of these URLs would point to the same
object, but the first URL would render it in English, and the second in
Danish. www.lld.dk/projects/teacherscertificate or
www.lld.dk/projekter/laerercertifikat
- Workflow to mark new content for translation and automatically routed to a
translator
- Multilingual keywords

Starting points
- i18nlayer (http://plone.org/Members/longsleep/I18NLayer/)
- TransType (http://plone.org/development/current/projects/TransType)



RELATIONAL CONTENT OBJECTS
------------------------------
We are an organization with consortia, projects and people and we would like
our website to reflect the relationships between these groups and
individuals.

For example, when you are viewing a project page, we would like a slot to
list the associated people, and when you are viewing a person page, it will
show a list of the projects the person is in.

Additionally, content objects such as news, events, articles, books, etc.
can be associated with any project or person.

Must have features:
- Consortia, Projects and Persons can be associated with each other.
- User interface should make it easy for end users to make these relations

Nice to have features:
- News, events, books, articles, and files can be associated with each other
and to consortia, projects and persons.
- Display these relations visually using the Touchgraph Java applet.

Starting points
- CMFCollection (http://sf.net/projects/collective)
- CMFRelation (http://www.zope.org/Members/digitalis/cmf_relation/)
- Zope Topic Maps (http://sf.net/projects/ztm)

- Touchgraph (http://www.touchgraph.com)
- Touchgraph LinkBrowser (http://touchgraph.sourceforge.net/)
- Protege 2000 (http://protege.stanford.edu)
- TGVizTab (http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~ha/TGVizTab/)



USER REGISTRATION
-----------------
We want to encourage site visitors to register on our site and become
members. We will have three basic types of users: anonymous, registered
member and internal staff.

The subtypes will be reader, contributor, reviewer and manager. A reader is
a member unable to add new content, a contributor can submit content but not
publish it. A reviewer can contribute content and publish it, and an manager
can do everything.

When a site visitor registers on the site, we will only collect the minimum
information necessary to keep the registration process quick and simple.
(Full name, Email address and password). We will have a check-box that asks
the user if he wants to subscribe to our email newsletter.

We will ask the user if he wants to subscribe to our printed newspaper. If
he answers yes, we will ask for his company, job title and mailing address.
This information will be stored in a MySQL database so that it can be easily
synchronized with our other contact databases.

Must have features:
- Extend the built-in user registration process to subscribe the user to our
email newsletter

Nice to have features:
- Extend the user registration system to ask the user for their company, job
title and mailing address. Store this info in a MySQL database.
- Synchronize this MySQL database with our contact databases and publish
combined contacts on website for internal staff to view.
- Allow internal staff to invite individuals from our master contact list to
become members on the site. The contact is pre-qualified to join as a
member, because we already have their contact info; they just need to choose
a un/pw.

Starting points
- Mailboxer (http://www.zope.org/Members/mjablonski/Mailboxer)
- KZMailman (http://www.zope.org/Members/khcarlso/KZMailman)

- How to add member data
(http://plone.org/documentation/howto/HowToAddMemberdata)
- CMFMember (http://sf.net/projects/collective)
- CMFAddressBook (http://sf.net/projects/collective)
- MySQL User Folder: http://www.zope.org/Members/vladap/mysqlUserFolder


USER AUTHENTICATION OF INTERNAL STAFF
----------------------------------------------------------------------
All of our internal staff members are given accounts in Active Directory. We
store a lot of information about them in this directory, such as their job
title, department, phone numbers, etc. We would like to avoid having to
maintain this contact info in two places and offer our staff a single-signon
for our IT systems (including the CMS).

Must have features:
- Staff can be authenticated on the Plone website using their Active
Directory username and password.
- Contact info stored in Active Directory can be queried from the Plone site
and displayed on the staff members home page (My Folder) and in the Members
listing.
- Non-staff users are authenticated by the normal Plone method, and this can
co-exist with the Active Directory authentication of staff.

Nice to have features:
- Staff members can update their contact info from within Plone, and have
these changes reflected in the Active Directory.

Starting points:
- LDAPUserFolder (http://www.dataflake.org/software/ldapuserfolder)
- LDAPWin32 (http://www.zope.org/Members/volkerw/LdapWin32)
- How to authenticate users against an LDAP server or MS Windows Active
Directory http://plone.org/documentation/howto/HowToActiveDirectory
- How to authenticate users against Windows domain using exUserFolder
http://plone.org/documentation/howto/HowToexUserFolder


WYSIWYG EDITING
------------------------------
We need a WYSIWYG  editor on our website. Most of our content is going to be
added by non-technical users, and they are in most cases going to copy-paste
the content from Microsoft Word documents. Hence, we need an editor that can
clean up Word (and other) tags. We are now using CMFVisualEditor, but haven'
t been able to make the tidy function work, as it works on demo.plone.org.

Must have features:
- tidy function: the editor cleans up the file for various tags when saved.
- upload images: instead of having to first upload an image to the site and
then link to it, it should be possible to upload the image directly from
your local computer to the editor interface.
- add local links: user can browse through the hierarchy of the site
- user can choose to have the link open in a new window
- stylesheet maps to Plone.css: the stylesheet in plone should work directly
in the editor


Nice to have features:
- cross-browser/cross-platform compatible
- upload an MSWord document and have the text box be populated with the
contents of this file. After the upload operation, the HTML is filtered
through a tidy function to strip all the MSWord tags out.


Starting points:
- CMFVisualEditor (http://sf.net/projects/collective)
- Epoz (http://www.zope.org/Members/mjablonski/Epoz)
- Htmlarea (http://www.zope.org/Members/to_be/htmlarea)

- MSWordDocument (http://www.zope.org/Members/eric_barroca/MSWordDocument)
- Html2SafeHtml (http://www.icoya.de/support/download_area/zope/htmlsafe)
- CMFOODocument (http://www.zope.org/Members/longsleep/CMFOODocument,
http://www.icoya.de/support/download_area/zope/CMFOODocument)
- iCoya WordXML (http://www.icoya.de/support/download_area/zope/WordXML)




EXTENDING THE EVENT TYPE
----------------------------------------------
We need to extend the event object type, so that it is possible to add body
text (with WYSIWYG editor), just like the News Item in Plone, and to add
links (internal and external).

Must have features:
- Add body text: we need to add body text (with WYSIWYG editor) to an event.
- Add links: we need to add links to programs, invitations etc. to an event.

Nice to have features:
- Event registration: we would like our users to be able to register for an
event online. Users are prompted to login or register to the website to
register for an event and add their address. When they have registered for
event they show up on an 'Attendee' - list.
- Add this event to my Outlook calendar. Users can click on an icon and the
event will be downloaded as a vCalendar or iCalendar file. This will launch
Outlook and ask the user if he wants to add the event to his Outlook
calendar.

Starting points:
- CMF Event
- www.zug.dk  has a good example of registering for an event
- Managed Meetings implements the vCalendar.
(http://www.zope.org/Members/EIONET/ManagedMeetings)







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