1 - what is Knotes?

KNotes is a fully-featured, standards-suporting, multi-user weblogging and discussion system for Zope and Plone.

It has very thorough support for external editing, trackback, RSS/atom, categories, files and navigation, and can be easily customised, integrated or embedded with other Plone and Zope content and features. It combines the speed of SQL with the flexibility and power of the Zope object database.

It is usable and installable already, but we are still improving the discussion interface and ease of system-admin installation. Watch the blogs for more info on progress

2 - what is it for?

1. collaborative weblogging and discussion, hosted in a powerful and flexible open-source content-management system
   • - if you want to provide weblogs and discussions to a community, you can easily use Plone and KNotes to do so
2. enhancing community interaction, collaboration and discussion in Plone, and improving Plone's range and richness of RSS feeds
   • - Plone is a popular and easy-to-set-up choice for community and project sites and portals, but 'out of the box' it is weak at discussion and 'casual' collaborative content creation, and though it supports RSS for searches, news items etc, the ability to track Plone community sites via RSS is limited
   • --- KNotes adds much more powerful and easy to use discussion, casual content-creation and RSS to Plone
   • --- Knotes, together with Plone, the weblog APIs and RSS, can even make a community information and discussion service for which no-one needs to use a web browser
3. a platform for educational experimentation and innovation

• educators enthuse about weblogging as a tool for their students, but want to explore options and combinations beyond 'plain weblogging'
• KNotes makes it fairly easy to "mix, rip and mashup" weblogging, discussion and other Plone products, content and features
  • even with no programming at all, creative new 'mashups' can be explored
• KNotes, based on Zope, the Content-Management Framework and Plone, makes a solid basis for experimenting with new ways of using online tools for learning
  • a little bit of programming can go a long way in experiments, while more serious work is easy to package for robust sharing and distribution as zope 'products'

3 - what can you do with it?

LOADS !, eg

• as a site manager or community leader, easily set up a Plone Site plus Knotes, set up community weblogs and discussions, track and contribute from RSS readers and weblog-API editors
• as an independent writer or commentator, maintain your own fully-featured weblog within a Plone site or on its own, with thorough support for power-blogging tools
  • and use your weblog to host your own commentary on other blogs and content, leveraging trackback to link your commentary into the context/content you discuss
• as a teacher, explore ideas about embedding and customising weblogs in other educational content / contexts / features
• use it as a platform for educational-technology exploration, experimentation and development
  • for instance, extend the editing API for new kinds of external editor
  • for instance, experiment with Personal Learning Environments, using KNotes, PLone and Zope as a solid and flexible service host / hub
• add it to your site or portal just for its advanced, speedy, AJAX-enabled, trackback-enhanced forums
• etc etc etc... Knotes is there to empower *you*

4 - Where is it going?

• soon will have some large-scale deployments
• next basic steps are to improve skinnability and tune it for new contexts
• next year KnowNet will be looking very closely at exhancing KNotes for integration with SOCIAL SOFTWARE
• blogging2.0! .... :O)

links :

• Mike Malloch's elearning2.0 weblog : http://www.knownet.com/writing/elearning2.0
• EXAMPLE COMMENTS IN BLOG ENTRY
• EXAMPLE TRACKBACKS IN BLOG ENTRY
• KNotations ( where we post progress updates ): http://knownet.com/Members/mmalloch/blog
• KNOTES PRODUCT AREA : http://www.knownet.com/products/product-info/knotes