UW Oshkosh Plone confab report for Dec. 9, 2011

Code Repository Review

At last Friday's Plone confab, I went over about half of the projects in our Subversion repository, stopping at  uwosh.hrjobposting:

https://svn.it.uwosh.edu/trac/browser/Projects

Not a terribly exciting thing, but perhaps useful to provide context and a pointer to code that could be improved on or reused.

Polls/Quizzes

There was some discussion of a potential Plone quiz product that would allow self testing showing results and answers on completion, maybe including a video/screen cast.  To that end, you may want to have a look at a similar product that was just started: https://github.com/collective/collective.polls

Emergency Notification

A while ago we started development of uwosh.emergency.client and uwosh.emergency.master products that are a superset of the uwosh.simpleemergency product we currently run on the http://www.uwosh.edu/home page.  Given recent events, this could be something we restart work on, and possibly open it up to collaboration with other edu institutions as part of the PloneEdu initiative.

Fine Grained Field-Level Workflow Control

The uwosh.fieldworkflow product is something we wrote to enable finer grained control over field-level attributes that are workflow state aware, ie. should be editable or visible or required (or not) in a given workflow state.

Things That Can Be Borrowed

The uwosh.checkout product (with workflow) was started for Brian, so we could set up resources (projectors, laptops, etc.) for checking in/out by faculty/staff.  Could be another collaborative work item for PloneEdu.

Social Interactions

The uwosh.blotter ("blog" + "twitter") is something I started to find ways to engage users in ongoing discussions that currently are forced through mass email lists and therefore would cause an inordinate amount of email traffic to people who aren't interested.  This product could mesh with the Plone board product we have been contemplating for the campus Intranet.

Managing Projects with Plone

Another project that has been floating in the ether is a way for Plone to be used to manage project requests and projects, including tasks.  I think there is a fairly useful way to use Plone almost out of the box, with the inclusion of the Poi issue tracker and possibly other standard tools.  I am contemplating putting this idea out to the PloneEdu membership to see if there is interest in working collaboratively on that as well.

Confab for this Friday, Dec. 16

For this coming Friday Dec. 16 the IDEA Lab has been booked all week.  I will let you know once we've been able to reserve a new location.  David is proposing to present the library's work on web services.  Please let me know if you have other topics you'd like to present on as well.

This Friday will also be a Plone Tune-Up Day.  You can find out more about it at http://plone-tuneup.ning.com/