the Design Experience Weblog Archive

Well, this weblog has categories, but until today had no way of producing a feed for a category. In face I have an "Open Source Content Mangement" category suitable for the front page of Planet OSCOM. Henri Brgus mentioned my dilemna and I was inspired to work on category specific weblog feeds for OpenACS.

It fit is fairly well with the data model for the weblog package, but I need to do a little testing and produce an upgrade script and then add it to CVS. I also need to provide a user interface to RSS enable categories. I did it all in the database while I was experimenting.

I am posting this so I will be challanged further to finish this.

Oops, I found a bug as I posted this entry. More work to do.

I think I like the home page redesign, its quite simple, clean, and I think all the information is arranged logically. I got inspiration from the album conver from Chance and Circumstance. The album has some great music on it, as well as a nice cover.

I want to focus on the fundamental needs of content management listed by Karl Goldstein, author of the original CMS from ACS/OpenACS 4.

Always keep in mind the core function of a web CMS from the user's perspective: the ability to easily create, edit, organize and manage and publish chunks of HTML text, where in most cases each chunk equals a page.

That said, authoring content is really the heart of the user experence for a CMS. And the coolest CMS editing experience is not the one that gives authors complete ability to go wild with formatting; it gives them the flexibility they need to present their content while constraining them enough to ensure consistency and reusability across a site.

A CMS needs to make is easy to write to the web. This needs to be kept in mind all through development. This is where OpenACS usually falls down. OpenACS makes it great to design a robust data-model, with complex permissions, workflow, and a powerful templating system. All the tools are there. They just need to be presented to the user in a way that makes sense.

The coolest editing experience also gives the authors to ability to insert and configure reusable dynamic components into their pages

This is where it starts to get tricky. It is easy enough in any web toolkit to add in dynamic parts to a page. Figuring out how to present this to the user is a challange. The editing experience needs to make it simple to add these elements to a page. I think, mostly, it is best to add the dynamic elements to a template, into which the actual content is then placed. This is good for navigational elements, links to "related items" and that sort of think, but it leaves out the ability to add images. Of course and img tag can be supported, but users really want to be able to look at a bunch of images and then pick one to insert into their content.


The other extended features Karl mentions are: a tool to configure navigation, link checking, themes to change the colors/look without editing template code, and asset management, which I just mentioned. Managing image, audio, video, and other resources is important for most users.

I think a major part of the user interface solution is Kupu, the new OSCOM backed project for a rich editing user interface that works across Open Source CMS platforms. It offers structured editing of content, and will include the ability to select and add images and links to content. I am excited about the development of Kupu, and I believe it is the best option to offer a great experience for content management in OpenACS and other Open Source platforms. Now I just need to make it work.

Maybe that is the key. Computers used to "educate" instead of used to enhance learning not be that effective. The example the author gives as positive is unrelated to whether or not there are computers in the classroom. A good teacher making the kids think can help. Using computers to explore and develop ideas can be effective. Of course exploring and developing ideas is learning, not "education".

We need to stop trying to educate and start showing kids how to learn.

Great quote from Weblogg-Ed where I found the Slashdot review

And I think if more people could engage their children and their teachers via the transparency that the technology provides, maybe people will be able to recognize the benefits more easily.

File Storage has the basic folder listing view showing the filename, size, type, and date of the file. One of the most requested features was sortable columns. After you get more than a few files in one folder, it helps to be able to sort them.

Another problem was that type was returned as the mime type which looks like "application/msword" or something similar. OpenACS has a nice user-friendly description of the mime type that says "Microsoft Word". Thanks to Lars for pointing me in the right direction to fix that. When I have more time, I would like to work on a feature to display a mime type specific icon. Ximian has a nice collection of mime file type icons.

I added the ability to delete a folder and its contents, a feature that somehow just never got added to the OpenACS Content Repository. Besides the web user interface changes, WebDAV support was added to File Storage. The WebDAV spec requires a delete of a folder delete all contents, so I added that ability as an optional parameter in the content repository function to delete a folder.

In addition, support for multiple file selections for copy, move, and delete functions were added.

Soon I hope we can get some feedback from actual users on these improvements and make everyone's experience better.

A demonstration of the latest OpenACS File Storage package including WebDAV support is at http://tdav.museatech.net/.

My idea is for a general solution to mount one attachments instance (per subsite) and give every user a personal folder in that instance. Then, offer to the user on upload to put the item by default in their personal folder, and then to show a list of all file-storage root folders the user has CREATE (or WRITE) privilege over. The user could drill down into those folders to choose the ultimate destination folder.

It should be possible for an application to supress the dialog and only allow upload into the users personal attachments folder. This would be to simpify the user interface for many applications.

Allowing upload to one folder per user would make it easier to enforce item and folder contents size limits per user.

The main issue to address is permission on the uploaded items. It seems that attached items should inherit permission from the item they are attached to. At least. Perhaps some additional permissions should also be applied. Probably the uploading user should have admin over the attachment object as well.

More design thought required.

OpenACS Forums post: http://openacs.org/forums/message-view?message_id=184335

I did have a small issue with some master templates that had been locally modified, but I switched to the official versions, editing one line in the site-master.css and was all ready to go.

There's a few small bugs in the interface between the web content and the WebDAV content, but it is pretty close to being ready.

In addition to adding WebDAV support, there was an effort to improve the usability of the File Storage package itself.