Mike Malloch's SuprGlu : recent blogging, bookmarking and images / kind=progress report/

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!

I wrote the other day about progress towards microformats and structured-blogging support in knotes:

Steve has the Event microformat type working in a test installation now. Another few days should see tests within our main knotes production version. Other special types should be coming thick and fast after that, some of them for very special uses such as within learners' eportfolios, some of more general use. Exciting developments!

More progress to report. The editing interfaces and scripts have matured - for instance objectless-editing is now possible (so that users can safely and swiftly invoke the editor formlets and then change their minds) and Steve has a generic macro-based way to creating the formlets. New formats are also supported in his tests: hreview, and our own google-video-clip format (we have clients who are putting workplace-learning video clips into google-video and we want to make it easy to embed the information and players for these in our own content).

This development strand is especially important for our planned e-portfolio work, and for anyone wanting to make it easy to add special kinds of structured content in their weblogs. Watch this space for more progress reports.

In a post on Monday I noted that it now seems to "just work" when you copy and paste knotes content within a Plone site.

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.

Yesterday we had another fast-action-request to move a year-old knotes weblog from one portal to another. You cannot use TTP copying and pasting between portals (note that by TTP or CMF-wise copying/pasting we mean through the Plone interface - by going into folder_contents view on enclosing folders while in ordinary website view). To copy content between portals it is necessary to go into the ZMI (Zope Management Interface) view and either use ZMI copying and pasting or export and re-import the weblog. We had run into problems with these advanced actions before, and have not tested them in a long time, but thought we'd give it a go.

It just worked. Exporting to a .zexp file from one portal and importing that into another worked fine. Caveats: the weblog was small and had no comments, just blog entries; and we made sure that there were corresponding users in the target portal and imported with the 'save existing ownership information' option.

This is good news for busy site administrators. It means that you should be able to let uysers create weblogs wherever they like, safe in the knowledge that you can move them later, even onto different servers and portals. We are eager to have some help testing advanced admin actions like this - please let us know if you can help.

I've mentioned a few times recently that we're working towards using microformats / structured-blogging to allow users to represent special kinds of content within their knotes weblog entries. There are many reasons for taking this route: it allows users to see content-creation as more homogeneous and spontaneous; it represents special content structure in interoperable machine-readable formats; it allows us to generalise the notion of special content types from the point of view of knotes' own interfaces and leave the details to special-type plugins...

The first few special structurings we'll be looking at are: event, google-video clip and embedded RSS, after which we'll be looking at variants on review. See my earlier post in elearning2.0 for a sketch of the merits of embedding live RSS to augment a blog entry (eg as reference list or background-resource links ). See this post in the work-related learning blog for an illustration of embedding google-video content in blog content. Event as a structured-blogging type should be pretty obvious: roughly, it takes the place of the Plone 'Event' content type allowing users to denote upcoming events in an ad-hoc but machine-readable way so that they integrate with portal calendar and can be aggregated into iCal syndication.

Events as microformats embedded in the blog content have the additional advantage that 3rd party harvesters can discover the event-wise information directly from the rendered html / rdf of the blog entry.

Steve has the Event microformat type working in a test installation now. Another few days should see tests within our main knotes production version. Other special types should be coming thick and fast after that, some of them for very special uses such as within learners' eportfolios, some of more general use. Exciting developments!

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.