OzZope Meeting Notes for meeting held at Trinity College, Melbourne University - Wednesday 14th April

Apologies: Kevin Littlejohn, Richard Jones and David Lutz

We had a great presentation by OzZope member Melanie Kendell about the pivotal role of Content Architects and the key elements of a successful content management system. Melanie described how she changed and streamlined the workflow of an organisation. Hired for 6 weeks to write a help document she is still there nearly a year later helping the firm implement many many time saving content management ideas into a cohesive whole. Getting the Right Content into Content Management Systems.pdf The presentation was marred by an uncouth comment about Melanie wearing shorts. "We've seen the legs, now lets see the brain" just before she spoke. Come on guys lighten up - it can be a touch daunting to do a presentation, even harder when you are not a geek and a female in a male dominated sphere.

Next I gave a demo and hands on look at Kupu the cross platform cross browser wysiwyg editor in Silva. Kupu uses CSS, Java script and asynchronous saving to avoid pop up windows. I gave a checklist of why Silva stands out as a publication system. Infinitely nested hierarchy of publications and folders to structure content. Indexing and an automatic table of contents. Imports and outputs XML, can do a round trip of Word using Docma extension. Content can be re purposed, ghosted, without duplication. Fine grained access across the site for Managers, Editors and Authors. User friendly Silva Management area. External Services to allow a host of different dynamic inputs within documents. Text stored as unicode, which means content in multiple languages can be mixed in single documents freely. Versioning of content. Authors can work on a new version of a document while a previous version remains published. Automatic emails to authors and editors for workflow events. LDAP. Extensive Groups management. Layout Templates can enable different subsites to have different layout and designs, RSS and so on... Silva Background

In the round table session we discussed:

+ the Conference offer for OzZope members to have a Zope Python stream at the Perl Mongers Conference in December at Monash University. It was thought this was going to be a lot more achieveable than organising a Zope/Python conference from the ground up.

+ Trinity as a venue and the fact that many people had experienced difficulties getting into Trinity due to unexpected locked gates. Its no fun to roam around the outside of the college in the dark looking for an open gate. Last night there were no open gates again. We have decided to hold the next meeting at another venue. If anyone has a suggestion please let us know. Next meeting will be in July.

Jan Smith