Presenters introduce themselves first
Also find out about roles, technical experience, experience with CMSs etc -- as per pre-course questionnaire.
Also:
For people having trouble connecting to the internet: help on hand during coffee break
For people having trouble installing Plone: help on hand at lunch and at end of day
There are several technologies common to all software calling itself Content Management Systems (CMS). Most CMSs have many more features, but this is the canonical list.
Discussion of other content management systems people have used; pros and cons vs Plone.
Content providers don't need to know any HTML or CSS: WISYWIG tools enable markup.
Extent to which your developers need to know XHTML, CSS, Javascript, RSS, tal, python etc depends on what you want to do
This is a concepts slide. Visible content versus metadata needs to be introduced because the metadata is so to important to CMS functionality and information architecture, and often ignored by content providers.
Structure site, develop functionality and content to match what users want to know and do.
Requires an understanding of who users are, how they think and behave: user research and testing.
Need to decide whether you will have one site with lots of subsites, or lots of sites.
Subsites enable easy sharing of content (no need for web services) but theming can be more challenging.
Separate sites enable easy differences in theming but sharing content requires web services.
Here we discuss how to customize:
Plone lends itself to an agile approach. Its object-oriented database and extensive through-the-web editing tools mean that different structures can be quickly and easily tested.
Roles and workflow enable great control over who sees what, when, where.
Train your content providers! Writing for the web is not the same as writing for print. Don't let them cut and paste from print brochures onto the web.
Not an exclusive list, but resources we find ourselves going back go time and again. Not just for ourselves, but also to point out to decision makers that what we're advocating is best practice ("look, it's here in a book"… so it must be correct, right?)
Note: adding products is typically the job of the web administrator!
See https://weblion.psu.edu/trac/weblion/wiki/IntroductionToProducts
A very useful product for generating online forms that can mail themselves to someone and/or write to a database. You can view the database onscreen or you can download it.
Buildout may help keep lots of development environments synchronized; also to replicate production environments
Good luck!
Keep in touch
Catherine Williams and Christian Vinten-Johansen