Plone & Collaboration Tools News August 2006

Welcome to the first issue of Plone and Collaboration Tools News.  This newsletter was created at the request of members of the DART community to receive information regarding the development and use of Plone in the DART project.  If you'd like to read the online version of this newsletter, it can be found at: #.

Background

In this issue we give some background information regarding Plone, news of development efforts, a brief how-to, and a description of some collaboration being done by a few of our DART members.

• Why are we using Plone?
  Content management systems like Plone allow researchers to easily share content, files and other digital object within a web environment without needing to learn web authoring technologies.
  
• What do we hope to accomplish?
  We are integrating Plone with Storage Resource Broker to allow members of the DART team to upload and view raw data, images, calculations and analyses (including metadata) obtained from research projects.
  
• What are some of the user benefits we achieve with Plone?
  Researchers can use Plone as an interface to distributed file systems, data grids, digital libraries and semantic webs.
  
  

New development
Russell Sim, the administrator for Plone has implemented new workflows to allow people to post documents which are only accessible to members of the site, by using a workflow state. Any new item that is created will default to private or inherit its parent folders state.  He has also added improvements to the overall display of the interface to handle inconsistencies with Internet Explorer and updated the DART site with the latest version of the software.

 At long last a user manual for Plone is available on the DART site at: #. If you have suggestions for additional areas which should be covered in the user manual email Dianna Hardy via hpc_plone@jcu.edu.au.

Focus on Collaboration
In each issue of this newsletter we will highlight one area of content which has been place in the DART portal on the Plone site.  This time the focus is on Cameron Huddlestone-Holmes who is working on one of the Davies Reef Sensor Network Demonstrator, which will monitor environmental conditions on the Great Barrier Reef and stream the data back to shore. This project uses technology being developed primarily within DMQ1 and DMQ2.

 Cameron is using Plone to write a blog detailing the progress of the project, to store documentation for various components of the system so that they can be accessed by others, and to publish information on the project itself.  He has given write access to other members of the project team to allow them to add content. Regarding the use of Plone for his work, Cameron said "Plone is easy to use and it's particularly good for adding content without having to think about the layout of the web page."

How To
In this section we answer questions from the DART community regarding using Plone. This month a user asks:

 Q:  How can I get Plone to display a different home page for my folder?

 A:  By default Plone displays a list of the contents of your folder and a brief description.  In order to change this view, you will need to create a new page and set the folder to use this page as the default view for the folder.

 Instructions:

1.      After logging in to Plone, click the My Folder link on the Personal Bar

2.      Click on the Display menu and pick "Select a content item as default view".

3.      Select the item that you would like to be displayed as the default page of the folder and click the save button

4.      In order for the page to be visible you must choose "Make internally visible" from the state menu on the Plone bar

Comments
We'd love to hear any comments that you have to make regarding this newsletter or the use of Plone and other collaborative tools in the DART project.  You can attach comments to online version of this document stored on Plone at:

# or send them via email to the Plone development team at hpc_plone@jcu.edu.au.