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)