Re: SquishDot

[Tim Wilson <wilson@chemsun.chem.umn.edu>]

On Tue, 27 Jul 1999, Bruno J. Vernier wrote:

> So I am going to go even further and suggest we think about making seul-edu
> a portal (not right now, but we can start building it or designing it)
> It does not matter to me whether we use squishdot or not, what matters is
> that we should be prepared for a possible geometric increase in participation.

I've been considering this portal concept for our school district's Web
site. It has been very interesting to consider the ramifications. 

Until now, the vast majority of school Web sites don't provide any reason
for a community member, parent, or student to check back often. They're
way too static. Zope provides a wonderful mechanism to change that.

Besides Squishdot, Zope 2 will feature a product called the Zope Portal
Toolkit. You can think of Squishdot almost like a special case of the ZPT.
Squishdot was obviously created to mimic Slashdot. The ZPT provides a
more general set of tools for creating portal sites of all types. Note: I
think ZPT is still in quite active development and remains a largely
moving target.

I've been working this summer with our SysAdmin installing Linux on an old
Pentium to act as our Web server. I'll be installing Zope in the next few
weeks to begin to test it out. One of the biggest problems we face (and
I'm sure we're not alone) is the issue of maintaining the site once it's
online. For example, none of us that are building the basic infrastructure
want to be responsible for all of the site's content. We'd like to provide
the minutes for the Board of Education meetings on the site, but I don't
want to type them up. Zope allows you to distribute editorial control!
I'll elaborate.

As the site administrator, if I want to make the Board minutes available,
I create an area of the site for that purpose, designate someone who will
have control of that area (and that area alone), and provide him or her
with the necessary password. Now after a Board meeting, that person can
type (or cut and paste) the minutes into a Web form and have them
immediately available on the site with *ZERO* help from me. Repeat this
process for anyone else who would like to add content to the site. This
feature alone has sold me on this product.

I'm just scratching the surface here. I've been considering ways to
utilize user logins (a la Slashdot) to personalize the site so that
visitors can exclude information that's not pertinent to them or their
students. You could give access to any group in the community that has an
interest in the school or its students. Your school's site could easily
become your community's portal. Cool.

So I guess I agree with Bruno. Eventually, it would be great if SEUL-EDU
was the portal for using free software in education. But don't board up
the listserv yet :-)

-Tim

--
Timothy D. Wilson			"A little song, a little dance,
University of MN, chem. dept.		a little seltzer down your 
wilson@chem.umn.edu			pants."   -Chuckles the Clown
Phone: (612) 625-9828                       as eulogized by Ted Baxter