This is an attempt to explain how the site could work.

Plone  is a  sophisticated “content management system  (or framework) ” (acronyms CMF or CMS). It’s important for everyone in the  the LS ‘core group” to  have some idea of what is meant by “content management”. I’ll try to explain a bit about it in my own words but it is also worth reading the Wikipedia article (which is about content management systems in general rather than about Plone in particular.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_management_system

Software for content management is designed to enable the building of websites containing a large amount of content which can be displayed in flexible ways.  Content management systems also allow for collaborative work on material for publication.  A good CMS is designed to separate the content on the website from the underlying technical infrastructure.  It therefore allows people with minimal technical understanding to provide content for the site without relying on a web master to put it on-line for them.  Contributors don’t need to know any HTML or anything about the underlying mechanisms by which their material gets converted into useable web pages.

In addition to this  a  good CMS allows for flexible “permissions” regarding who has the power to do (and see)  what on a site. This means that people can be given varying levels of access to the site – and that the site is protected from the errors of inexperienced people.

Plone (and LS) more specifically

We chose Plone because it is both open-source and very powerful. Currently there isn’t an alternative open-source system which could provide the sort of content management we want. (There are also many frustrating aspects to using Plone but I will only mention these in passing – the fact is that currently there just isn’t a better alternative for us.)

Some people have said “why don’t we just have a blog like Harry’s Place?” “Why bother with all this Plone stuff?” etc    This is a natural question to ask, given that almost all the site activity has focused around our forum which currently lacks most of the bells and whistles which come automatically with blogging software.

However LS was never meant to be just a forum (or just a blog) . We were aiming to provide an integrated resource centre which enabled people to join us and collaborate in writing their own material and gathering pre-written material from the www.  The forum/blog was meant to be a (vital) adjunct to this.  If we had successfully developed the content management side of things then our forum material would be less ephemeral and thus far more effective.

Of central importance is a useable folder structure in which to display our material.  A folder structure is essentially a navigation tree in which material is systematically organized by category and subcategory.  The yellow folders which are visible on the Welcome page on the left hand side are all “top level” folders and each of these top-level folders (categories) contains other folders (sub-categories).  As I’ve mentioned before we need to do substantial work on improving the current LS folder structure/navigation tree.

Related to this (and depending on it) is the necessity to begin making use of the Plone “work-flow” system so that members can begin to contribute material to the site in other ways than just through the forum.  The basic idea is that members can use their own workspace on the site (ie their folders) to store and write and material which they would like to see featured on the site. By ‘featured” I mean displayed somewhere more visible than it would be in their folder. In general that would mean being displayed within our folder structure in the appropriate location(s).

Plone is designed to make this easy.  An LS member can put something in their folder and then submit it for publication.  Once the item is submitted, a person with reviewer permission  is automatically notified and can then proceed  to read  it and decide whether (and where) it should be published. 

Published material can then  become the subject of forum/blog items with links both ways.  Working in this way would make our forum/blog material far less ephemeral as it would be integrated with material elsewhere on the site.

As mentioned above Plone also allows for various forms of group work.  Permissions can be granted in such a way that certain members are given management rights over specific areas of the site other than their own folder. For instance currently DavidMc  has permission to manage one top level folder (Bright Futures). 

In order to start using Plone properly we need to write some end-user documentation for members so that they can begin using their folders to contribute to the site.  We also need to train up our core group so that we can appoint people as reviewers and put them in charge of various sections of the site.  Currently only a couple of people have any real understanding  and most content just flows through me. 

I am hoping to write up some documentation which will help people get up to speed –endeavouring to find time to do that at the moment.