rose.pruyne

I just published this article at plone.org on Andreas Mantke, a deputy member of the Board of Directors of the Document Foundation for LibreOffice . Mantke led a workshop for new Plone site administrators in the LibreOffice community during its annual conference last week. See the full article at plone.org/news/andreas-mantke-to-lead-site-administration-workshop .

I recently wrote this article for plone.org about the University of California, Los Angeles Diazo Work Group that collaborated with other members of the Plone community to improve Plone’s Diazo UI. Read the full article at  plone.org/news/ui-project-leads-to-significant-improvements-in-plone-4.3-theme-editor .

What does it take to be successful on the Web? The answer to that is simple and yet not so simple: Provide relevant information. Make it easy to discover... >>> Read the rest of this guest article on Dr. Terry Etherton's blog at blogs.das.psu.edu/tetherton .

Frequently, potential adopters of Plone at universities tell me that they have a difficult time convincing administration within their organizations that Plone -- or any open-source content management system, for that matter -- is worth the investment of time and effort. Or in the case of Penn State's WebLion services , any consulting fees that may be involved. This proposal is loosely based on what I wrote for my own shop. However, I am fortunate to work in a highly clueful department . Making the case for adopting an open-source enterprise-level content management system was not an arduous task. With that in mind, I'm sharing the following example proposal for adopting Plone at the university department level. If you are striving to convince your organization to adopt Plone, feel free to make use of any part of this material for your own justification. In this example, the department currently maintains a home-grown content management system based on proprietary tools...

Aside from the usual reasons why it's silly to duplicate static content from Web page to Web page, here is yet another: If your Web site has content copied and pasted from one page to another, it is very likely that Google is filtering out some or all of the involved Web pages from search results. The reason: The Google search engine does its best to optimize user experience by returning unique content. Because no one wants search results listing page after page of the same stuff. always crashing in the same car: recurring mistakes and misuses of the web Higher Education and other organizational Web sites tend to needlessly replicate content. This happens perhaps most frequently when information is repurposed as marketing material. The same content ends up appearing at its original source as well as at one or two marketing pages. Unfortunately, if this marketing material resides above the core content in the site hierarchy - and it usually does - it can end up replacing the core ...

Just when I was hoping for a resurgence of flaming skulls...

I recently heard tell of the following activity, parading as content migration to an enterprise level content management system. I am not making this up: Copy large volumes of Web-content-to-be, page by page, into separate Dreamweaver files containing the design (created and sliced up in FireWorks) Copy/paste said Dreamweaver files into content wells of the content management system Repeat this activity ad infinitum until an entire Web presence is constructed in this fashion always crashing in the same car: recurring mistakes and misuses of the web When I heard this, something inside me snapped. Aside from the stunning inefficiency inherent in creating all these disparate Dreamweaver files, this activity points to a fundamental lack of understanding of what exactly a content managment system is. In the interest of quelling this misunderstanding in others, here follows a list of what not to do with a CMS: Dump a bad Web site into a good CMS. If your organization's Web presence is a ...