Products.FacultyStaffDirectory 2.1

Version History

' ' 2.1 -- ' '

* Corrected some CSS display issues with Person pictures.

* Users with the Personnel Manager role can now add Person objects.

* Added a field to the classification gallery view to control the width of the Person images

* Multiple FacultyStaffDirectory objects can now exist in the same site

* Improved product reinstallation performance

* Added an assistant field to confer profile editing delegation on other users

* Added a "can manage personnel" field to the sharing tab

* Added i18n hooks for all fields and templates

* Removed a boatload of unused imports

* Removed WebLionLibrary dependency

* Eggified product

* Configlet icon should now work properly in VirtualHostMonstered sites

* vCard should handle unicode characters properly now

* vCard images now display

* Empty biographies stay empty

' ' 2.0 -- ' '

* Added an A-to-Z listing view for Directories and Departments.

* Forced Previous/Next display in the Person editor.

* Bug fixes

' ' 2.0a1 -- ' '

* Integrated with Plone users and groups.

* Switched extensibility framework to archetypes.schemaextender. More
than one extender works at once now, and all content types are
extensible.

* Added Department content type.

* Sortable Name is now available as a SmartFolder index (mainly for
sorting).

* Added SmartFolder fields for Departments, Classifications, Committees,
Specialties, and People.

* Templates are faster.

* Non-ASCII characters in Person titles work.

* People now have a Middle Name field.

* Specialties and other types of person groups can now live outside the
Faculty/Staff Directory.

* Specialties are now listed in a sane order.

* Committees Folders are now addable within Departments.

* Added a configlet in Site Setup to allow customization of phone number
and user ID validation as well as the ability to disable aspects of
membrane integration.

* Silenced some deprecation warnings.

* Added support for Plone 3's versioning.

* Renamed content types to avoid collisions with other products.

* Added oodles of new tests.

* Ditched ArchGenXML, making our code much cleaner.

* Made more use of GenericSetup.

' ' 1.0.1 -- Minor documentation tweaks

' ' 1.0 -- Initial release


Description

FacultyStaffDirectory is a personnel directory, a provider of shared
workspaces for committees, a way of keeping track of people's areas of
expertise, a floor wax, and a dessert topping. It integrates with Plone's
users and groups infrastructure and supports an extensibility framework for
custom requirements.


Dependencies

Everything you need is included with the product bundle:

* Products.Relations

* Products.membrane

* archetypes.schemaextender

* If you're using Plone 2.5.x, the branch of Archetypes available via
Subversion at
http://svn.plone.org/svn/archetypes/Archetypes/branches/1.4-schemaextender-support.
(If you're using Plone 3.x, the 1.5.x version that comes with it is fine.)


Installation

FacultyStaffDirectory works with Plone 2.5.x and 3.x, though the
installation instructions differ. For each version of Plone, there are a few
choices of installation method, depending on how your Zope instance was
installed and on your personal preferences.

Plone 2.5

Buildout (recommended)

1. Add the following to buildout.cfg::

[buildout]
parts =
. . .(other parts). . .
facultystaffdirectory-core
infrastructure
eggs =
. . .(other eggs). . .
Products.Relations
archetypes.schemaextender == 1.0

[infrastructure]
recipe = infrae.subversion
urls = http://svn.plone.org/svn/archetypes/Archetypes/branches/1.4-schemaextender-
support Archetypes
svn://svn.zope.org/repos/main/Products.Five/tags/1.4.4 Five

[facultystaffdirectory-core]
recipe = infrae.subversion
urls =
https://weblion.psu.edu/svn/weblion/weblion/Products.FacultyStaffDirectory/tags/2.1/src/Products/F
acultyStaffDirectory FacultyStaffDirectory
http://svn.plone.org/svn/collective/membrane/tags/1.0 membrane

[instance]
. . .(other instance configuration). . .
products =
${buildout:directory}/parts/infrastructure
${buildout:directory}/parts/facultystaffdirectory-core
. . .(other product locations). . .

2. Re-run buildout (typically 'bin/buildout').

2. Restart Zope.

3. Install the FacultyStaffDirectory product using
portal_quickinstaller or the Plone Add/Remove Products tool
under Site Setup. The necessary dependencies will install
themselves automatically.

Manual

1. Install the dependencies:

1. Put membrane and Relations (included) into your Products folder.

2. Put the included copy of Archetypes into your Products
folder.

3. Install archetypes.schemaextender:

1. Open the archetypes.schemaextender-1.0 folder (included)
and find the "archetypes" folder within.

2. Place the archetypes folder in the lib/python folder
within your Zope instance.

2. Put FacultyStaffDirectory into your Products folder.

3. Restart Zope.

4. Install the FacultyStaffDirectory product using
portal_quickinstaller or the Plone Add/Remove Products tool
under Site Setup. The dependencies that need to be installed
will install themselves automatically.

Plone 3.x

Buildout (recommended)

1. Add the following to buildout.cfg::

[buildout]
eggs =
. . .(other eggs). . .
Products.FacultyStaffDirectory

2. Re-run buildout (typically 'bin/buildout').

2. Restart Zope (typically 'bin/instance restart').

3. Install the FacultyStaffDirectory product using
portal_quickinstaller or the Plone Add/Remove Products tool
under Site Setup. The necessary dependencies will install
themselves automatically. (Membrane remains in the 'available'
column, but is in fact installed.)

Egg-based without buildout

1. If you're using a non-buildout Plone installation, use
easy_install to install Products.FacultyStaffDirectory.
Dependencies will be installed automatically.

2. Restart Zope (typically 'bin/instance').

3. Install the FacultyStaffDirectory product using
portal_quickinstaller or the Plone Add/Remove Products tool
under Site Setup. The necessary dependencies will install
themselves automatically. (Membrane remains in the 'available'
column, but is in fact installed.)

Manual

Don't do this if you can help it.

1. Install the dependencies:

1. Put membrane and Relations (included) into your Products
folder.

2. Install archetypes.schemaextender in the following disgusting
way:

1. Find the "archetypes" folder, somewhere in your Zope
instance (lowercase "a", not uppercase "A"). It's often in
lib/python and should have a "kss" folder in it. On
Windows, it's at C:\Program Files\Plone
3\Python\Lib\site-packages\archetypes.kss-1.2.6-py2.4.egg\
archetypes.

2. Put the
archetypes.schemaextender-1.0/archetypes/schemaextender
folder (included) into the archetypes folder.

2. Put FacultyStaffDirectory into your Products folder.

3. Restart Zope.

4. Install the FacultyStaffDirectory using portal_quickinstaller or
the Plone Add/Remove Products tool under Site Setup. The
dependencies that need to be installed will install themselves
automatically. (Membrane remains in the 'available'
column, but is in fact installed.)


Upgrading

To upgrade from 2.0, just follow the installation instructions above.

To upgrade from 1.x, use the migration script in the Extensions folder of
FacultyStaffDirectory. Follow the instructions inside
migrate1dot0to2dot0.py. To perform the migration under Plone 3, you'll need
the "contentmigration product":http://svn.plone.org/svn/collective/contentmigration/.


Using FacultyStaffDirectory

Adding a Faculty/Staff Directory

From the "add" dropdown menu in Plone, select "Faculty/Staff Directory". A
Faculty/Staff Directory will be created as well as several default items
inside:

* Faculty (a Classification)

* Staff (a Classification)

* Graduate Students (a Classification)

* Committees (a Committees Folder, which can hold only Committees)

* Specialties (a Specialties Folder, which can hold only Specialties)

Any or all of these default items may be safely deleted as needed.

Working with your directory

FacultyStaffDirectory provides content types for creating and organizing
details of people. It has principally been developed for personnel
directories in educational institutions but can be repurposed for use in a
variety of settings.

The core content type is Person. This has a variety of fields (email,
telephone number, job title, and so on). You can also easily add your own.

Out of the box, FacultyStaffDirectory offers 3 Classifications that can be
assigned to Person objects: Faculty, Staff and Graduate Student. If these
don't work for you, you can add your own Classifications (e.g.
Administrators, Technicians, Board Members, or whatever you like).

FacultyStaffDirectory also provides several content types for grouping
people: Departments, Specialties and Committees. If these labels don't make
sense in your organization, you can easily relabel them. In each case, the
association between the Person and the grouping (e.g. the Person-Specialty
relationship) can be given a description. So, for example, if Person Jane
Doe is in the Artificial Intelligence Specialty, you could give the Jane
Doe-Artificial Intelligence relationship a description (e.g. "Interested in
the cultural impacts of machine thinkers").

FacultyStaffDirectory can be configured so people added to the
directory automatically become Members of your Plone site and each person
can edit his or her own page. It also adds some new roles, to facilitate
management of people. For instance, the PersonnelManager role can create new
Specialties and assign people to them.

Membership integration

Out of the box, FacultyStaffDirectory offers the following integration
with Plone users and groups:

The Faculty/Staff Directory itself acts as a group. -- ' '

All Person objects created in the Faculty/Staff Directory are
automatically considered members of this group. This group also
provides the option of assigning a global role to all Persons in the
Directory. This option should be handled with care. It is generally
best to select only the 'Member' role, as this is the most restrictive
option.

Departments, Classifications and Committees act as groups. -- ' '

Global role assignment is not available for these content types, but
the groups they define may be granted local roles throughout the Plone
site. For complex academic units, this can be a great time-saver,
since personnel management can be tied closely to site security
management.

Person objects act as users. -- ' '

The Faculty/Staff Directory configlet in Site Setup allows you to
choose whether Person objects provide passwords for authentication. If
you are using some other PAS plugin for authentication, such as
PloneLDAP, ApachePAS, PubcookiePAS or CAS4PAS, you will want to
disable password provision so that authentication will cascade to
these other systems.

Users defined by Person objects are automatically granted the Owner role
locally for that object and its contents. This allows users to add to and
edit their own biographies, contact information, etc. They also control
sharing rights to their object and can thus allow assistants to edit content
on their behalf without sharing their own passwords or user preferences.

The 'My Folder' action, found on the personal toolbar, is altered by the
Faculty/Staff Directory product to take users defined by Person objects
directly to them. Users defined through the standard Plone UI will be taken
to the usual location (portal/Members/<userid>). Likewise, the personal
preferences link found in the personal toolbar and on the
plone_memberprefs_panel or dashboard will take Person users to their Person
objects.

Owners are not granted the rights to add or remove their Person object from
Departments, Committees, Classifications and Specialties, since these
collections are used as authorization groups. Instead, this right is
reserved for site managers and for the newly-created 'Personnel Manager'
role, installed with the Faculty/Staff Directory product. The Personnel
Manager is likewise not granted access to the ZMI or to personal preferences
for Persons. This allows for fine-grained separation of management concerns.

Membership integration for Person, Department, Classification and Committee
objects is configurable. A switch to turn the function on or off is in the
Faculty/Staff Directory configuration panel in Site Setup. It may be
necessary to disable membership integration for Person objects in systems
that have established user bases built on LDAP systems, for instance.

Configuring the product

Several global settings, such as phone number and user ID formats, can
be controlled through the Faculty/Staff Directory configuration panel
within Site Setup.

Extensibility

Because every organization has a few unique requirements,
FacultyStaffDirectory supports an extension mechanism based on the
archetypes.schemaextender library. Using it, you can write plugin products
which add fields to or otherwise modify our content types. For an example,
see the FacultyStaffDirectoryExtender
product and "its
README.txt":https://weblion.psu.edu/svn/weblion/weblion/Products.FacultyStaffDirectory/tags/2.1/sr
c/Products/FacultyStaffDirectory/examples/FacultyStaffDirectoryExtender/README.txt.


Design Rationale & Thoughts

Why the push for just one Directory in a site? Why not just add people to Departments? -- ' '

The main thought behind this was that People could be members of
multiple departments (i.e., faculty member John Smith teaches courses in
both MSIS and Computer Science). So where do we put the Person object?
We'd like to refrain from making two Persons if possible, and the
alternative of making a Department both a container and a referenced
object could be nightmarish.

Why add membrane? -- ' '

We wanted a relatively simple way to let members modify their own
profiles. With membrane, we get that right out of the box since that
profile *is* the member. We also get nifty groups like "Faculty" and
"Chemistry Department" and "Some Useless Committee".

How do I manage People across multiple Plone sites? -- ' '

We wish we knew. We suspect it will have something to do with LDAP.
Suggestions?


Future Plans

See the "3.0
roadmap":https://weblion.psu.edu/trac/weblion/milestone/FacultyStaffDirectory%203.0%20%E2%80%93
%20Hateful%20Haberdasher.


Possible Gotchas

Skinning plone 2.5.x with DIYPloneStyle 2.5

The implementation of Generic Setup installation in DIYPloneStyle 2.5
fails to include non-standard skin layers in its skins. Please note
that installing a skin product built with this version will cause
skin-based functionality in FSD to break and may cause site-wide
template errors due to missing skin layers from the relations product.
You can fix these problems by manually adding the layers
'FacultyStaffDirectory', 'relations', and 'relations_images' to any
skins defined in ZMI &rarr; plone &rarr; portal_skins &rarr; properties.


Authorship

This product was developed by the WebLion group at Penn State University.

membrane integration by Cris Ewing at the University of Washington.

Special thanks to Andreas Jung for his early testing, code contributions, and reminding us that,
yes, people do live outside the United States.


Support

* Report bugs to the "WebLion issue tracker":https://weblion.psu.edu/trac/weblion/newticket?
component=FacultyStaffDirectory&version=2.1.

* More documentation:

"https://weblion.psu.edu/trac/weblion/wiki/FacultyStaffDirectory":https://weblion.psu.edu/trac/weblio
n/wiki/FacultyStaffDirectory

* Contact us::

WebLion Project Team
Penn State University
304 The 300 Building
University Park, PA 16802
support@weblion.psu.edu
814-863-4574


License

Copyright (c) 2006-2008 The Pennsylvania State University. WebLion is
developed and maintained by the WebLion Project Team, its partners, and
members of the Penn State Zope Users Group.

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free
Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option)
any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT
ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for
more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with
this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple
Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA.