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elearning2.0 :: putting the 'oh!' back into elearning Weblog 32 entries 04-August-2006 1 authors
show or hide details for this item Some ideas for simple Plone work to make this easier, more flexible and more efficient Discussion Topic 0 replies 03-November-2005 Mike Malloch
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03-November-2005 08:07:37
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Mike Malloch
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Developing some ideas for authoring in Plone with live embeds from 'my content outside'
( 2005-11-03 09:07:08.29 ) Have a look over in my elearning2.0 blog for (a) some further improvements towards a more usable KNotes discussion system, and (b) the initial development of some ideas and techniques about portal content development. The basic idea is to make it as easy as possible for ordinary end-users to pull live links-lists, photos, etc from their 'content outside' - their del.icio.us bookmarks, flickr photos, etc. A long blog post details one trick that works now in any CMS, giving hot examples. Comments on that blog entry are beginning to work out the design of a Plone product and a kupu plugin tool to make such functionality even easier, more powerful, and more polite to external service resources.
I've been meaning to post another big blog entry about this but have no time. I've had some thoughts towards designing very simple Plone add-ons that would make this even easier for end-users, give them access to their content/tag streams from flickr, furl and other social-software services, and cache the RSS within their local portal, sparing del.icio.us bandwidth. It would also overcome the glitchiness of having javascript-based writing into the document, with round-trips from another, site during pageload. We do not have time to write these now, but I'll try to elaborate on the design as soon a I can.

A few quick thoughts on thee design of Plone product and customisations to make this technique even easier to use, moreefficient and more flexible:

Plone 'My Content Outside' product
Give the use access to an in-portal interface for specifying an RSS feed from the well-known services ( or entering an RSS url ) amd setting some display parameters and update-frequency. This creates an RSS-consuming object ( like CMFSin and KNSin do, but placelessly unlike KNSin and with an enduser-interface unlike CMFSin). This would allow the portal to manage the fetching of the data from the feed's source at sensible intervals. It also registers the availability of that feed for use by that user or all users or a group of users.
kupu toolbar options to choose a 'my content outside' feed or make a new one
Customise kupu to allow user to insert one of these within their own content during WYSIWYG editing. This would obviate the need for endusers to edit raw HTML, and would radically cut down the number of steps required.

Then, we can avoid the glitchiness of having the rest of thte document wait for some external content to be fetched, by either embedding the live content into the actual page content ( serverside include ) or making a more sophisticated AJAXian javascript technique which inserts a placeholder during pageload and stuff the live data into that after the rest of the page has loaded.

None of the above would be hard to do, though there would be a few days' worth of refining entailed as soon as users got hold of it in anger... Customising kupu would introduce maintenance issues, sadly, but the kupu developers have done it right and made a way to plug-in extra editing services. Th user-interface for specifying a feed from flickr etc could take a bit of time to get right, but could be added and improved incrementally.

Watch this blog anbd KNotations later in November 2005 for some fleshing out of these issues.

Oh - and in case this isn't obvious: parts of the 'My Content Outside' interfaces are also needed for knotes member-profiles - in fact Steve has already made some progress towards those as part of our profile work.

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