Mike Malloch's SuprGlu : recent blogging, bookmarking and images / development/knotes/

We have been extremely busy improving, testing and just plain using KNotes... though we have not been doing a very good job of blogging about it :o)

We've been hammering out many new features in several areas: collaboration / social software / community building / profiling and portfolios. Many of those features are not yet being used in our production version, but over the next months expect to see an increasing number of special-purpose blogging scenarios and features in our portals.

Our public, mature version of KNotes is about to take a small leap forward as well. We are almost finished preparing and testing a new public beta - 0.85. The tarball will be available here by Monday. SourceForge's site has been having a lot of problems lately, so we're not sure when the CVS version will be updated; please use the tarballs released here for the time being.

I'll try to document some of the new features in this weblog. If you have any questions please feel free to email me -- mike AT theknownet DOT com

Sometime in the next week, I'll also - finally! - be announcing KNotes within Plone.org. Many apologies to the hard-working Plonistas who've had to nag me to get round to this; our procrastination has been in part down to wanting to make the documentation more complete and the skin-ability more thoroughgoing :o}

I plan to work hard over the next 10 days on roadmap documentation. We'll also be starting either mailing lists or special blog_forums for users, administrators and developers, and sometime this summer knotes.net will at last get the facelift it needs.

KNotes can be a very powerful and user-pleasing addition to a Plone portal. Knotes + Plone makes a great platform for experimenting with educational or other applications which combine weblogging with social software and/or other functionalities. If you would like to try making use of KNotes, please let us know how you get on. If you feel you can help with development, documentation, or best-practice illustration, we'd really love to hear from you!

One of the big advantages of developing knotes as a product within Plone / Content-Management Framework (CMF) / Zope is that it enables very powerful site-admin actions, including implementations of the copy and paste metaphors extended over large chunks of content. It turned out to be quite a lot of work ensuring that the metaphor would be sustained for objects and transactions as complicated as knotes requires, but we've done and tested that work as we went along.

In the National Guidance Research Forum (NGRF), we have been using knotes in anger for over a year now. In the process of exploring the uses that site managers and end-users can make of weblogging and discussion, there was a proliferation of weblogs over time (one of the other "advantages" of CMF is that it is very very simple for users to create new weblogs - maybe too simple :o).

In advance of a major symposium Friday, and following on from the big improvements we've recently made to usability, we were asked to rapidly re-organise the main weblogs in the NGRF. See the NGRF group discussions area for the end-result: there are now just 3 weblogs in the main public area. We moved a number of blogs and a few indexFolders full of blogs (and nested folders full of blogs, etc), and merged three blogs into one. All of this "just worked" using copy and paste TTP (through-the-Plone interface). We encountered and repaired two small issues.

This involved hundreds of blog entry and discussion objects, and worked very smoothly and quickly. We're not sure what would happen if tens of thousands were involved, but even at that scale it should "just work".

Last week, we completed pushing the recent improvements to knotes into the CVS version and tarballs at the knotes sourceforge area. We've been intensively testing in our own user communities as well as in a variety of test installations. It seems to just work, and end-users seem to just get how to use it, so we feel we're approaching a really useful product. To reflect this, we've incremented the version number to 0.8 BETA. Well done and many thanks to Steve and to our beta testers!

Still to-do are the writing of better admin documentation and end-user help, and the provision of developer forums, issue-tracking, etc. We're attending to those requirements as quickly as other work allows.

We are confident now that other Plone admin folks should be able to install knotes easily and make good use of it to add dynamism, discussion and user-expression to Plone sites. Please do try it out and let us know of any issues you encounter.

We're also confident that knotes with Plone provides a rich and flexible platform for experimental projects looking into variations on the theme of blogging - into uses in learning and community building where the basic behaviours and building blocks of blogging need to be enhanced or contextusalised. That's why we built it, and we're already starting to make progress with some ideas of out own that make use of knotes 'plus'.

If you are an educational researcher or community developer, please get in touch with us and share your ideas; we may be able to help. We're particularly keen to explore lightweight services-oriented approaches in the "web2.0" style - adding microformats, integrating with social bookmarking, etc. We are also eager to enhance the profile-building and user-glu aspects of the knotes member-profile, and to explore the use of knotes + Plone for e-portfolios and personal learning environments.

Within a couple hours, we'll have our production version of knotes in shape and suitable for deployment on other peoples' zope/plone installations. Huzzah!, phew!, and none-too-soon! :o)

We now have to carefully merge our production version with the CVS at the knotes sourceforge area, and make a new tarball to put in our own downloads areas, based on that CVS version. We expect it to take the rest of this week, given other demands on our time - though we can hope for speedier progress.

Once we have a stable and highly-usable release on sourecforge, we'll concentrate on improving documentation, and on providing issue-tracking etc - we'll make an open blog-forum for developers to post queries and share ideas as well

Of course we'll also have to do some writing at our own product pages :o) I'd also very much like to get some time to do justice to the knotes.net site, which is an utter mess now. I want to use knotes.net as a text-case for a plone sitelet theme / customisation-policy, comprised transparently and attractively of just a blog or two and a few simple downloads/content areas (inspired by particletree.com).

I'll post a note here when we've upgraded the CVS version of knotes.