Plone NGO Mailing List Offline Plone

Fri Nov 17 14:13:37 UTC 2006

Please Russ, keep me abreast.  This sounds quite interesting and very applicable to where we may be heading in the future...Mobile Plone and all.

Thnx
Curtis

Curtis M Carlson
curtis.carlson at louisville.edu
502-852-1987
IT / Website Coordinator
----------------
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(KPPC)
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University of Louisville 
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===============
"When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty, I only think about how to solve the problem.  But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it's wrong."
--Buckminster Fuller--

>>> Russ Ferriday <russf at topia.com> 11-17-2006 6:02 AM >>>
[I have sent a copy of this mail to the parties concerned but in a  
separate message, due to mailing list constraints.]

There was some discussion on this topic, and also some concrete  
action in a useful direction, at the Bozen/Bolzano sprint last week.

Outcome so far is in the collective as "forest" - Many tests will  
run, but it is completely unusable for any real business purpose at  
the moment, and may remain so until we converge on it again.

Use cases were:

   offline plone - researchers going into the field with some empty  
folders, and
          merging new content in those folders when they return -  
This could eventually
          become bidirectional/universal synch - like Notes

   migration - taking content from 'foreign' CMSs and inserting into  
Plone

   processing - processing content from one part of a site, and  
putting into another part of a site (example - expanding STX to HTML)

But that was just scratching the surface. SVN lurked large in the  
conversation, and the selector/distributor paradigm fits well with  
the needs of SVN.

We created an architecture defining Source and Target Interfaces.  
Implementations of these contain implementations of Selector and  
Distributor, respectively. Selectors and Distributors each possess a  
collection of channels. A high level controller class puts Source and  
Target in touch, which allows channels to be negotiated, and an  
appropriate controller to be instantiated.  Transfer occurs through a  
converter class that is initially null, but can do any necessary  
processing/conversion.  The idea is to delegate negotiation of  
transports, formats, etc, as low as possible.

Jens Klein has refactored part of XMLForest with a goal of reusing it  
in this new architecture. Robert Niederreiter and Thomas Holleister  
and I worked on an IMSCP implementation, which is a soon-to-be-iso  
content format for learning content, which happens to be very suited  
for export from CMS because it defines Organization elements, which  
allows multiple 'views' of content linkage (hierarchical, flat,  
heterachical, etc.). Stefan Eletzhofer and Ramon Bartle
were also involved in quickly and efficiently prototyping the  
architecture and testing the results.

The initial goal is a lightweight proof-of-concept for export/import  
to IMSCP. From that point, we would like to make lightweight  
implementations of other standards, before getting too "hung-up" on  
one use case. This will give us chance to prove the architecture  
before making a big commitment in a single direction.

There will be many benefits of converging on this kind of  
architecture, the main one being that of interoperability of  
implementations/encapsulations of formats and other CMSs. My first  
goal is a system that I can point, for example, at and old Cold  
Fusion site, and suck in the content, deriving hierarchy from  
parent_ID params in the URL.  Beyond that I want to include various  
additional features related to multilingual requirements. The use  
case for offline plone came from Louis Wannijn of the Royal Belgium  
Institute of Natural Sciences and from Patrick Ohnewein of cocos.bz

I'll be getting back into this later next week once back in UK.  If  
anyone is interested to be more closely involved, please drop me a  
line, and I'll get you on the list I/we will shortly set up. This is  
a topic I will mention at the Brussels meeting on Plone in public  
organizations, next week.

Finally, a big thank-you to Patrick Ohnewein of cocos.bz, Paolo  
Gongilli and Konrad ? of the University of Bozen/Bolzano in South  
Tyrol for providing space, network, and lots of support.

Best,

--r

On 17 Nov 2006, at 09:19, Alexander Limi wrote:

> On Wed, 15 Nov 2006 07:17:27 -0800, <rgregory at oxfam.org.uk> wrote:
>
>>  Are there any plans for Plone to support mobile/off line working?
>
> This is indeed something we'd like to support * and as other people  
> here note, it would have to be with something similar to a  
> replication strategy that synced back and forth and handled  
> conflicts (if any).
>
> Ideally, you should be able to run Plone on a laptop, select an  
> area of the site that you want to "take home", and perform edits on  
> it and sync back later. This would assume that you have the same  
> products installed on your laptop, but should be doable. Most Plone  
> content is easily diffable and mergable, seeing as it's HTML-centric.
>
> Unfortunately, this is not a trivial undertaking, and until a  
> couple of companies/organizations pool together on getting  
> something like this built, I doubt it will be done.
>
> We were discussing this a while back under the moniker "Mobile  
> Plone", and I believe Paul (Everitt) has some interesting ideas on  
> it too. It's always been one of the things that everybody wants,  
> but nobody has a big enough need for to actually start developing  
> seriously.
>
> I do believe that there are many more NGOs that would be interested  
> in something like this now than when we last discussed it, so it  
> should be possible now if the resources are there.
>
> -- 
> _____________________________________________________________________
>
>      Alexander Limi · Chief Architect · Plone Solutions · Norway
>
>  Consulting · Training · Development · http://www.plonesolutions.com 
> _____________________________________________________________________
>
>       Plone Co-Founder · http://plone.org · Connecting Content
>   Plone Foundation · http://plone.org/foundation · Protecting Plone
>
>
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> NGO mailing list
> NGO at lists.plone.org 
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Russ Ferriday - Topia Systems - multilingual content management
contact: russf at topia.com - (+44) (0)2076 1777588 - skype: ferriday
a member of the
evenios group