Magnolia is a free, java-based open-source CMS. Details from the Magnolia site:
Magnolia is the first open-source content-management-system (CMS) which adheres to the upcoming standard of Java content repositories (JCR).
Its main goal is ease of use for all parties involved in running a CMS. It features a very flexible structure, platform-independence through the use of Java and XML, a simple to use API, easy templating through the use of JSP, JSTL and a custom tag library, automatic administrative UI generation, transparent and uniform data access to multiple data repositories, easy configuration through XML, easy application integration and easy deployment with professional staging on any J2EE Server.Posted by Karl at 09:00 AM
Intel has published a story about an Oregon principal who is using weblogs, along with other technologies, in his elementary school:
Lauer also has set up an internal weblog for communicating with staff. This online forum replaces the email bulletin that staff used to receive each Friday. Because the software includes a comment feature, teachers can use the weblog to engage in dialog and discussion. Instead of being a message from the principal, the weblog has the potential to spark dialog and build community. "Technology flattens an organization," Lauer says. "It makes information transparent and allows people to share knowledge."
The school's public website, also powered by weblog software (MovableType) is at http://lewiselementary.org/. This might be one of the better school websites I've seen.
(via Tom Hoffman)
Fans of Edward Tufte will love this...
Jonathan Corum has a really fascinating look at the geographical breakdown of votes from the 2003 California recall election. In short, looking at a standard map showing which candidate won which county gives us a very incorrect impression. Corum dissects the map and draws us a series of more useful maps.
(via Jeff Veen.)
The latest issue of A List Apart features Daniel Frommelt's CSS makeover of Slashdot ("news for nerds"). Frommelt does a great job leading the reader through the steps in the process. In short, it looks something like this:
1) Strip out presentational tags (font, table, etc).
2) Add structural/semantic tags (h1, div, etc).
3) Wrap groups of content in divs.
4) Layout the page using CSS.
5) "Skin" the page with a CSS design.
Update: Frommelt has written a second article, showing some of the additional benefits. The standards-compliant Slashdot prints better and plays nicely with handhelds. Nice.
The kids at Slashdot have been discussing the OpenCD Project and a recent article by Dr. Paul Cesarini on the OpenCD and Monocultures.
Cesarini writes about the dangers of a monoculture. As in biology, where the lack of diversity can spell trouble for populations, Cesarini argues that a Microsoft-only world stifles innovation. He points to the stagnated development of Internet Explorer and Office. Open source, and specifically the OpenCD, is the alternative.
The OpenCD brings together Windows versions of open-source software in an effort to make it easy for non-technical users to obtain and install the software. They make a point of only including one program in a particular space, so the user doesn't have to figure out which app to use. OpenOffice and Mozilla are the big names on the disc.
And, if all of that wasn't enough to make this interesting, the OpenCD project sees education users as a target audience. Cesarini writes:
While specifically hoping to attract "non-techies" to OSS, secondary and higher education institutions are also a key target group for this project. They have kept this in mind during the development process and have consciously excluded certain programs that schools or parents might object to such as games with violence and peer-to-peer (P2P) filesharing software clients.
From a web developer after updating an old, non-standards compliant site:
Of course, at the end of the day, I've had something reaffirmed for me as well: folks, it's not worth working without web standards any more. That's it: no zealotry, no nothing. If I'd started with a foundation of valid, well-structured markup that was styled by CSS and scripted through the DOM, I wouldn't be ranting at you today. But now, I've a solution in place that's about 60% lighter than the previous one, degrades gracefully to older, non-compliant browsers, and ensures that I won't have to deal with another “later” in another two years.
CSS Zen Garden's Dave Shea has posted a nice list of CSS tips. Perfect for those just getting into CSS, and a great refresher for old hands.
Update: Shea moved the crib sheet to a more permanent home: http://www.mezzoblue.com/css/cribsheet/.
A week ago I pointed to SchoolTool, an open-source project trying to create school administration software package. Tom Hoffman noticed my link and wrote an interesting history of the project. Then, the person paying for the development, Mark Shuttleworth, responded to Tom's post. Quite the chain of events, huh?
Anyway, both Tom's post and Mark's response are well worth a read. Both contain some interesting notes about SchoolTool itself, but they mostly focus on the management of open source projects. This makes them must-reads for anyone thinking of starting an open-source project.
In short, open source projects need a strong management component. Even well-funded projects with full-time developers need someone at the helm. From Mark:
So the risk is that a well-funded open source team that is NOT lead by someone with a personal interest in shipping the project will get distracted by other shiny tech toys and fail to actually ship something focused and constructive. How are we dealing with that in the current round of work on SchoolTool? First, I'm personally watching and asking the core team to focus on actual functionality. They assure me that their engine work is "done", and that they are currently working on a usable tool that can be tested by schools.
Time will tell. And second, we will shortly have a second, collaborating team, that will I hope also bring much of the engineering work into a more public forum. Time will tell. These are expensive ways to learn, but I feel that the experiment is very much worth doing. There are lots of tools I would like to see developed in the open source world that developers have not yet done for themselves, and which I would be prepared to fund. Perhaps other philanthropists are in a similar position. We need to learn how to do this effectively, and the only way to learn is to try.
Regardless, SchoolTool looks to be a project to keep an eye on. Between this and EduPlone, there looks to be some good activity in the open-source/education world.
[Update, 7/30/05: fixed EduPlone URL.]
I recently ran across EduPlone, an "open source learning content management system build on top of the web application framework ZOPE and the CMS Plone." The site seems rather devoid of content right now, but it might be something to watch...
The Web Standards Project has posted a great interview with Dan Cederholm on his redesign of the Fast Company and Inc.com websites. Dan has some nice insights into the advantages and challenges of converting to a XHTML+CSS design.
Lou Rosenfeld pointed to uzCardSort a Mozilla-based card sorting tool. Nice to see more development in this area.
If the CSS Zen Garden isn't inspiring enough, check out the CSS Vault. It looks like the site is just starting up, but it looks like they're adding more great examples and tips. Plus, they have a couple of RSS feeds to keep us up to date. Cool.
The latest issue of A List Apart features a great article by Jeffery Zeldman on Tackling Usability Gotchas in Large-scale Site Redesigns.
Improving usability is a good motivation for redesigns and was the driving force behind the ALA 3.0 redesign. But redesigns often introduce new usability problems. In this article, I’ll discuss one such problem and the way we addressed it, focusing on the creative dilemma and its solution rather than on the technical implementation details. You may be redesigning a large or mid-sized content site and restructuring it in the process. If so, you might face the same problem ALA did, and the thinking that went into our solution might help you craft your own.
Zeldman and company did a great job with the redesign, and their solution to the issues with changing URLs seemed to work well.
Jean Tillman has written a nice overview of some of the issues facing designers when working on web applications: User Interface Design for Web Applications: It’s a Different World from Web Site Design.
This article could be also be titled “Things I Wish I'd Known Before Designing My Latest Web-Based Application.” You see, I had experience designing Web sites. I’d mastered the art of creating catchy content. I worked with Web-savvy graphic artists who provided masterful images. I knew the latest HTML coding tricks and could design around the various browser quirks and incompatibilities. Armed with these skills and experiences, I volunteered to design the user interface for one of my company’s Web-based applications—and dove right in.
Its nice to see some attention paid to this area of web design. I think that creating web applications that look and work well is a huge challenge, and I'd love to see more articles in this vein.
SchoolTool is a project to create an open-source school administrative software package.
Our vision is for a common information systems platform for school administration from Cambridge to Calcutta, via Cape Town! We hope to provide a single tool that will be readily adapted to the specific regulatory requirements and practices of different countries and regions, but that retains enough common functionality to make a shared development effort worthwhile. The SchoolTool will be freely available under an Open Source licence, and commercial editions with additional functionality might also be available if 3rd party developers wish to build commercial products on top of the universal platform.
They're building it in python, too. Cool.
Here's a couple of reasonably advanced CSS positioning articles:
Flowing and Positioning: Two Page Models
Float: The Theory
Its great to see higher ed institutions publishing course materials on the web for all to use. The classic example is MIT's OpenCourseWare system. And more recently the Berklee College of Music has posted a series of free music lessons (like Basic Hard Rock Keyboard).
Of course, in both cases the school's aren't being entirely altruistic; the courses serve as great advertisements for the institution. After all, there is no substitute for the real thing. Or, to put it another way: the course information might be valuable, but it really has a limited life-span and ultimately, a fairly limited value. The experience of working with highly skilled teachers, plus the name recognition of a degree from a MIT or Berklee, is the real value here.
Abe Crystal and Paula Land have written up a nice summary of the Metadata and Search pre-session at the recent Dublin Core conference.
Boxes and Arrows recently added another great summary of the the Dublin Core conference.
Today's Seattle Times has a nice article on RSS: "Reeling in what you want from the Web" by Glenn Fleishman. Its great to see this technology trickled out into the mainstream. But, as others have pointed out, there are still usability problems with RSS. It is still a bit confusing to subscribe to a feed. I've been lucky in this respect, in that, a) I'm a geek, and b) I'm using NetNewsWire, which has a nifty drag 'n drop subscription feature.
Phil Windley pointed at the presentation archive from the 2003 Digital ID World conference. Most of the presentations have audio (in multiple formats, no less). Very cool.
One of the longstanding issues in the web development world is the difficulty (okay, impossibility) of running more than one version of Internet Explorer on the same machine. Looks like Joe Maddalone has figured out how to pull of this trick. This could make testing a bit easier, I think.
One of Amazon.com's neatest features is the recommendation system. Basically, they crunch together info about all of the items you've purchased (or rated or added to your wishlist) to date and try to figure out which other products you'd also like. Sometimes they end up with some wacky results. Check out this recommendation I got today.
Anyone have any good theories on this one?
Gus Mueller reports on Steve Kalkwarf's talk on software development secrets at the Mac OS X Conference. Kalkwarf is one of the programmers of the great BBEdit text editor (my main development environment), and he has a number of good points on software development. His main points were:
James Robertson has written a nice article on choosing the right CMS authoring tools. Authoring is one of the three big pillars of a content management system (the other two being storage and publication), and this article serves as a nice overview of the issues involved.
It is important to recognise, however, that there is no single best authoring environment provided by a content management system. Instead, the authoring tools must be matched to the job at hand, to ensure they are easy and efficient to use.