Forum OpenACS Q&A: New project CMS, KM etc.

There's already work underway to resurrect LDAP authentication.  It won't use the built-in Oracle hooks because it needs to work for both PostgreSQL and Oracle.  You can e-mail Lars at Collaboraid for more details.

Categorization ... there's some categorization stuff available already in the content repository and there's work underway do do a more general categorization package, check the recent thread in regard to this.  Folks should organize and work together if possible, though I realize client deadlines can make this hard or impossible to do.  There's no reason to duplicate effort if we can avoid it, and general categorization is badly needed.

Also check on threads here discussing the existing CMS (UI sucks, much of the included functionality does not) and the content repository.  The CMS/CR allows for the attaching of templates to content types or individual template items, automatic form generation and handling (only useful for simple page flow and content input but better than nothing) and other stuff.  Jeff Davis has been working hard to make these work as they were originally designed by Ars Digita, in both Oracle and Postgres.

Also if you're not already familiar with the templating system's form builder package, study it and the ad_form wrapper function we now use to write self-submit form generation and handling scripts.  Makes things much simpler.  The autogenerated forms mentioned above also uses the templating system's form builder package so you can customize the look of input forms site-wide by writing one new template file.

Workflow - we have a new, simplified workflow package courtesy of Lars Pind, who wrote the original acs-workflow while at Ars Digita.  The new one uses a finite-state machine model rather than petri nets - FSMs are sufficient for the simple workflow requirements we've run into and relatively few people are familiar with Petri nets.

Hello Ciaran,

I think it might be nice if the client has a choice of how the content lays out. You mentioned a portal-like layout potential. I think a good content management system would allow an authorised user to associate the inital content to several other types of content.

For example a news item might have three pictures, or none. It might be linked to other news stories. It might be linked to a critical document that has just been published.
A news story with three pictures, just for example,  would imply that instead of just designing one portal like template, you would design a more flexible system that could respond to the type of content.

Don and Lars can tell you about the best functional way to do these things. I've just had alot of experience with what clients want. Our people want alot of flexibility with the design, but thats because we are an extremely reactive bunch, used to changing our entire homepages daily. You might find that being in a Goverment situation, you'll need to change the front pages less often, but you'll get alot less minor hassle if you allow for more flexibility.

I hope this helps - it might seem a bit obvious :)

Hi Ciaran, great news!
Yes, it should be done in a Portal-based form, that's the way to go.
Are you planning to discuss openly with the community about the Content management & Knowledge management?
Both a really important issues for the future of openacs, I strongly suggest that the core things should be widely discussed here.

Hi Ciaran,

May I ask you how your project is progressing? We are currently setting up a KM group at La Salle university in Barcelona, and a mulilingual search engine would also be one of our first goals.
However, the second goal would be a "personalized" search engine, using Bayesian networks for selection purposes and a lot of other modules.

Bests,
Frank

mailto:fraber@project-open.com, http://www.project-open.com/