FacultyStaffDirectory is old, Archetypes-based and somewhat cranky. There are some implementations already, we need to collect what's useful out of these and decide what to base a new add-on around.
Once there's a base / new add-on repo, this discussion could be moved to Github.
FacultyStaffDirectory is old, Archetypes-based and somewhat cranky. There are some implementations already,
Asko and Rikupekka know about one, see Plone Conference 2014 - Plone at the University of Jyväskylä - 10 years of happiness and counting - Rikupekka Oksanen on Vimeo
Yes, we're currently using something called collective.roster in our university. Here's an example: https://ktl.jyu.fi/en/staff
Here's some info on the product:
Dexterity
Can be extended using behaviors
Folderish, containing Person-objects
Editor can add groups (simply a list), and link persons to those groups
3 differen views: alphabetical, grouped, gallery
Can show/hide columns in the table view, can reorder table contents (z3c tables)
Running on production sites (4.1.6, 4.2.x and 4.3.3) for a year now, works fine
BUT:
Also, here are alternatives to look at, already at pypi:
Some of the features of ibme.persondirectory:
@lentinj ibme.persondirectory sounds very nice.
Our (unreleased collective.roster, started already in 2012) is not as TTW-compatible. We have fixed base schema (with dexterity.membrane compatible field names, but no membrane forced membrane integration) and it has been designed to be extended with file-system code behaviors:
On searching, we rely on collective.dexteritytextindexer.
*) For table, we use z3c.table, which is a bit over-engineered for a table, but makes it easy to have optional columns and has also paging support with plone.z3ctable.
I'll work hard to finish this sprint early, so that I could polish our add-on from our internal cruft, so that it would be easier to evaluate.
For this discussion, it would be figure out common requirements. Our main issue with FSD was its tight coupling with Membrane.
We have over 200 sites and probably over half of them use FSD, in various ways but with at most several hundred (max ~250 profiles). Some examples are at
http://www.hist.cam.ac.uk
http://www.languagesciences.cam.ac.uk
http://www.mus.cam.ac.uk/
http://www.ceb.cam.ac.uk/
http://www.zoo.cam.ac.uk/
We have some extensions for adding external collaborators and affiliating people to a department/collect/institution, and we have a default set of fields for the profile that can be extended with a further 10 or so extra fields (from the ZMI). If their credentials are added to their profile, users get edit access via our local web-auth based authentication rather than using ldap. It would be essential for us to have a migration strategy from the current add-on to the new one.
I can add more about likes and dislikes, and what users would like to see, but all in due time!
Might a good step would be to agree on what features should be in a new FSD equivalent, as a base?
There was some notes made in our open space on desired features, I'm not sure what happened to them. However, I think the main next decision is if one of collective.roster et al could be grown into a new FSD.
Cris Ewing was going to write up some notes, but they haven't appeared as yet. Will try and get something together by the end of the week but I have a couple of busy days before then.
Here are the transcribed notes.
There was an open space discussion at the 2014 Bristol Plone Conference about Faculty Staff Directory. This is an old-style Archetypes add-on used by many universities, and we need a way forward for Plone 5. Here are the notes.
Participants:
Cris Ewing
Helen Sagan
Jamie Lentin
Rikupekka Oksanen
...
A number of new add-ons have been developed that provide portions of FSD functionality.
collective.contact.core: https://github.com/collective/collective.contact.core
collective.contacts: https://github.com/collective/collective.contacts
ibme.persondirectory: Jamie Lentin, there is one at www.ibme.ox.ac.uk
collective.roster: Rikupekka and Asko, there is one at ktl.jyu.fi/en/staff
collective.workspace, groups/memberships/rosters for mountaineers.org: https://github.com/collective/collective.workspace
Products.FacultyStaffDirectory, the original, which is not in github but is on pypi
We discussed the need for a central location for information about this project, and decided to create a FSD discussion on community.plone.org.
Open space participants brainstormed requirements. Here they are in no particular order.
Categorizations
Institution
Research group
Research subject
School
Department
Committee
Person type
Membership/rights - on/off switch
External data sync (which may go to a separate content type, like for a bibliography)
Multi-lingual
Less Fragility (renaming causes failures)
Performance
Flexibility
JSON API
Front-end rendering
Settings for site admin to choose fields
We finally released the source code for our product (collective.roster) after refactoring it from grokked Dexterity 1.x into Dexterity 2.x without grok (for Plone >= 4.3):
Cris Ewing is possibly working on c.roster membrane integration early this year.
Related blog post from Jazkarta
But collective.roster is still missing a public release. That's because as long as our Uni is still mostly in Plone 4.1.x, we need to stay in c.roster 1.x, while the current unreleased master has been refactored to Plone 4.3 and greater (with Dexterity 2.x).
So, because there's no release at PyPI yet, please, stand up, take the maintenance of c.roster master (>= 2.0) and make a maintained release.