Products.AngelPas 1.0b1

Description

AngelPas integrates ANGEL-dwelling course sections with Plone’s user-and-group machinery.

Each section gives rise to several groups:

• One for each team, name like “Philosophy 101 Section 1: Team A”

• One of people with the Instructor role within a section: “Philosophy 101 Section 1: Instructors”

• One of people with the Student role within a section: “Philosophy 101 Section 1: Students”

• One of people with the Writer role within a section: “Philosophy 101 Section 1: Writers”

• One named for the section itself, “Philosophy 101 Section 1”, which is a union of everyone in the above groups.

Groups that have no members are hidden to cut down on noise, since you can’t add anyone to them through Plone anyway.

The users belonging to the above groups are manifested as Plone users, complete with full names if ANGEL provides them. They can be assigned privileges and group memberships within Plone using its normal facilities.

For performance reasons, the information fetched from ANGEL is cached for an hour. To clear the cache, restart Plone.

Installation

Installation is like that of any other PAS plugin. The only gotcha is that AngelPas’s Properties plugin must come before Plone’s mutable_properties plugin.

1. Install AngelPas, for example by dropping it in your products folder.

2. In the acl_users folder within your Plone site, add an AngelPas Plugin.

3. Click the new plugin, and fill out the API username and password, the IDs of the course sections to use, etc. Click Save Changes.

4. Click the plugin’s Activate tab, and check all the boxes. Click Update.

5. Click the Activate tab again, then click the Propertes link next to the checkbox (not the tab at the top of the screen).

6. Move the AngelPas plugin above the mutable_properties plugin. Without this step, mutable_properties will obscure ANGEL’s provided full names with an empty string.

Use

When AngelPas has trouble communicating with the ANGEL server, it logs an error at the level ERROR. For example…

ERROR Products.AngelPas ANGEL roster request returned an error: Not authenticated

It then allows Plone to continue without presenting an error to the user. This at least allows the site to continue functioning at a reduced level while ANGEL is unavailable. It is advisable to monitor your logs to catch ANGEL problems especially after changing AngelPas settings.

Troubleshooting

An error like this…

ERROR Products.AngelPas ANGEL roster request returned an error: Not authenticated

…can indicate, at Penn State anyway, that your IP address is not allowed to access ANGEL. Contact the ANGEL administrators.

Authors

Erik Rose and Eric Steele of the WebLion group at Penn State University

Thanks to Joe Deluca’s RosterSynch plugin for inspiration!

Support

Contact the WebLion team at support@weblion.psu.edu or join our IRC channel, #weblion on irc.freenode.net. The WebLion wiki is full of good stuff.

Please report bugs using the WebLion issue tracker.

Version History

1.0b1

• So it begins. No known bugs but hasn’t seen a lot of real-world testing.