History for CMF_in_Education

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**How to Adapt CMF in Educational Communities**

*Warning: This is UNDER CONSTRUCTION, in fact, it is more like an Experiment underway; please join in this research/reflection*

**Questions**
- Should each **course** be given its own CMF portal?

**Tentative Procedure**

1. create CMF folder somewhere

2. **ReDirection**: simplify the URL access to the portal 

3. create an exUserFolder (to replace the default acl_users folder) and define [CMF_Roles]

4. work on the default CMFskin - (the portal's look and feel)

5. add appropriate CMFobjects

5. add [XML_Syndication] (educational news/resources from other sites)

6. fine tune the WorkFlow

5. browse through zopelabs for good recipes to add to this CMF

8. program missing components [CMF_programming]

10. Distribute a [CMF_User_Quide] to your users


**Advantages of using CMF in Education Setting**

- the management of passwords, logins is sub-contracted to CMF itself; the only work left is **to assign teacher, student and assistant roles** after people have created an account for themselves.

- the **desktop** paradigm is even simpler than for regular zope.  This is another time saver when dealing with students new to zope and especially if the course is not about zope itself.

- the **default workflow** system seems particularly suited to the drafts / final paper / mark workflow of traditional *marking of assignments/essays*

- new **workflows** could be programmed for other educational flowcharts

- everything is customizable

**Disadvantages**

- Another layer of complexity in an already very complexity-rich environment which means another thing to master for the system admins, 

- more demand for more features from the users (especially when they realize that everything is customizable and workflows are programmable)

**Resources**

- "Chapter 5 of ZWACK Zope book":http://www.zope.org/Members/beehive/ZWACKSamChap.html

- "CMF dogbowl online documention":http://cmf.zope.org/doc (the source!)

- "Zopelabs CMF cookbook":http://www.zopelabs.com/cookbook/byCategory?category=CMF (16 recipes on jan5)  thanks runyaga!

- "Virtual Host Tool for CMF":http://www.zope.org/Members/poster/CMFVirtualHostTool (alpha integration of Virtual Host Folder with CMF)