Eval Mentor : a case study of embedding knotes weblogs in special collaborative content types

20-December-2004

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We recently ported our Eval Mentor evaluation-decisions dialogue product to Plone. We found that this was very easy for several reasons having to do with the architecture of Mentor, but were especially happily surprised by how easy it was to make Mentor automagically embed a knotes group weblog to support discussion.

As part of our participation in the EVAL-4 project, KnowNet has recently ported a venerable old evaluation tool to play well in Plone sites:

Eval Mentor is a comprehensive online questionnaire which guides and buttresses a dialogue between an evaluator and a project which is commissioning or planning an evaluation.

KnowNet - Eval Mentor

We were happy to see that the porting process went very quickly - largely because Mentor is heavy on XML and clientside javascript-DOM processing, so all the server needs to know about an instance is its XML data string.

What surprised us (yes, even us :o) was how extremely easy it was to add a knotes group weblog to every Mentor instance (in Mentor, an instance is called a 'dialogue'. The main problems with our old implementation of Mentor were the difficulty of managing users and groups (which is made much simpler by Plone), and the lack of a good system for ad-hoc or focused discussions of issues arising during the Mentor choice-making process. A group weblog is ideal for supporting discussions arising from a Mentor dialogue.

In essence, it only took a dozen lines of simple boiler-plate python script to have every instance of Mentor create within itself a knotes blog. With a little more effort, we can tune the features of these blogs for the purposes Mentor will have in particular, and add fine-grained 'blog-this' affordances within the Mentor questionnaire.

A Plone-based, compact, customisable collaboratibe weblogging system turns out to be a darned useful piece of kit to have at a developer's disposal. We hope that others will be able to explore this kind of integration even further. We'll be releasing Team-Tasks - a resource and goal centred, time-limited collaboration environment which makes use of embedded group weblogs - sometime early in 2005, and hope among ourselves to come up with some more interesting examples of blogging for particular, embedded collaborative purposes.


Mike Malloch; 20-December-2004 17:14:12; forum (0) help

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