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Communication Tools Platform

PLONE IS DEPRECATED IN FAVOR OF DRUPAL see CommunityWebtools for latest state !!!


The Communication Tools Platform (CTP) advances to the first planning and development phase now. In respect of the evaluation results of deliverable [:Deliverables:D5.51], we will use the Content Management System Plone as base system platform.

Within the first phase, implementation will focus on following features:

  1. Access Rights Management

  2. Content Editing

  3. Bibliographic Referencing

  4. File & Image Sharing

  5. Blogs & Calendars

  6. Address Books

Access Rights Management

Regarding access rights management, Plone distinguishes between the concepts roles, groups and users. Roles define the final access rights enforced by plone. Groups and users may be assigned to one or more roles. Users may be member of several groups.

Basically, Plone provides the following roles:

  • Manager

  • Member

  • Reviewer

  • Owner

  • Anonymous

The manager role is comparable to an administrator. A member _is user registered to the site and may edit and create content. A reviewer additionally can publish content (e.g. to the "public"). The roles Owner_ and anonymous are automatically assigned, where the owner is the creator of a piece of content and anonymous represents any unauthenticated user (the "public").

The scope of these roles can be restricted to almost any piece of content within plone (e.g. group pages, blogs, folders). But, it is possible to define custom roles also.

So, if you have propositions of further role definitions, let us know /\

Content Editing

Plone provides an easy to use What You See Is What You Get(WYSIWYG) editor to create content documents online. It is also possible, to export these content documents as PDF, Office or MS Office files. You can also upload documents to be published as content directly.

Uploaded documents are rendered to HTML and updating these documents equals to updating the correspondent piece of content within plone. But currently, there is no way to get a full round-trip workflow, i.e. it is not possible to upload e.g. a Word document, modify it on-line and then (re-)export the resulting document as MS Word file.

So, we are encouraged to strongly watch any news regarding this item.

Bibliographic Referencing

Currently, Plone provides tools for editors to publish bibliographic references for the whole platform or to be kept on behalf of the owner(editor). Furthermore, (group) specific bibligraphic lists may be derived by selecting appropriate references from global or owner based lists. Thus, in a first approach two general policies appear feasible:

  1. Publish and edit all bibliographic references in one platform global list.

  2. Allow and provide user or group based references only.

Additionally, the following options may be thinkable:

  • both

  • Find a way to create a global list, where owners may restrict access to their entries individually.

Citing these references within content edited on the platform is possible. There is some work to do regarding the "rendering" of these entries (e.g. [r1|or [ABCD07]]) and the automatic generation of the bibliography at the end of an article.

File & Image Sharing

Plone provides several mechanisms to organise files and images into folders, and to share them with others through access control mechanism. Particularely, every user has a private "home" page, where users can create file and image folders and assign access rights individually to them.

Furthermore, these folders can be made accessible through e.g. the WebDAV (Web Folder in Windows), or FTP protocol. Any folder may be subject to additional version control or not. Thus, these folders might be used as containers for direct editing of documents, where any klick on the "save" buttons uploads and versions a new edition of the document on the platform.

So, in a first approach, we would propose to create templates for a version controlled folder for group pages, and a temporary (uncontrolled) folder at the users "home" area. The ladder may be subject of the users individual access rights assignments.

If you have other propositions, let us know /\

Blogs & Calendars

Blogs will be used to announce events or news, and make them available to external subscription as well as for platform, group or user definable news board items. Additionally, we plan to link calendar entries and blog entries, so that any added calendar event will also be presented within correspondent blogs.

All these entries will be taggable as well as we will provide measures to reduce the visibility of certain events to e.g. groups, or certain users only.

If you have other ideas or suggestions, let us know /\

Address Books

In a first version, we would like to encourage or enforce every registered user to provide some minimal contact information like name, address, telephone, email and area(s) of expertise. The ladder should pave the way for the construction of "tagged" list of experts in specific taxonomic areas, and to provide means to contact them easily. The former should result in a simple address book.

We plan to link these address books with a correspondent LDAP-Directory Service. So, that these data would be accessible using external applications (like email clients), but only for registered users of the platform.

If you have other ideas or suggestions, let us know /\

Updated by Andreas Müller almost 2 years ago · 7 revisions