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Provides content types for creating and organizing personnel directories within educational institutions. Integrates with Plone's users and groups infrastructure and supports an extensibility framework for custom requirements.

Project description

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

' ' 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


FacultyStaffDirectory

Versions

Plone 2.5.x or Plone 3.0.x

Dependencies

* 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 3.0.x, the 1.5.x version that comes with it is fine.)

Description

FacultyStaffDirectory allows you to keep track of people who should be listed on your website.
Add details just once (even import them from an existing listing) and display them wherever
you like, however many times you like.

FacultyStaffDirectory integrates with Plone's users and groups infrastructure and supports
an extensibility framework for custom requirements.

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 Students. If these don't work for you,
you can add your own Classifications (e.g. Administrators, Technicians, Board Members or
whatever you like).

FacultyStaffDirectory gives several content types for grouping people: Departments,
Specialties and Committees. If you are not in an institution where these labels make sense,
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 that people added to the directory
automatically become Members of your Plone site, so that each person can edit
details of his/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.


Installation

Buildout (recommended)

1. Add ''Products.FacultyStaffDirectory'' to the eggs section of your buildout, ie.
# Add additional eggs here
# elementtree is required by Plone
eggs =
elementtree
Products.FacultyStaffDirectory

configuration and 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 dependencies that need to be
installed will install themselves automatically.

Manually

1. Install the dependencies:

1. Put membrane and Relations into your Products folder.

2. If you're using Plone 2.5.x, put the included copy of Archetypes into
your Products folder.

3. Install archetypes.schemaextender as follows. Please bear with us, as
this will be a bit tricky until it gets included in a future release of
Plone:

* If you're using Plone 2.5.x, open the
archetypes.schemaextender-1.0b1 folder (included) and find the
"archetypes" folder within. Place the archetypes folder in the
lib/python folder within your Zope instance.

* If you're using Plone 3.0.x, 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.
Put the archetypes.schemaextender-1.0b1/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.



Upgrading

A migration script for using Faculty/Staff Directory 1.x content in
Faculty/Staff Directory 2.x is in the Extensions folder of this product.
Follow the instructions inside migrate1dot0to2dot0.py.

Migrations in Plone 3 require 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.

Membrane Functionality with FacultyStaffDirectory

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 in the personal toolbar, is altered by the
Faculty/Staff Directory product to take users defined by Person objects
directly to that object. 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.

Membrane functionality for Person, Department, Classification and
Committee objects is configurable. A switch to turn the function on or
off is available on the Faculty/Staff Directory Configlet in Site Setup.
It may be necessary to disable membrane functionality for Person objects
in systems that have established user bases built on LDAP systems.

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 FacultyStaffDirectory/examples/FacultyStaffDirectoryExtender
product and "its README.txt":https://weblion.psu.edu/svn/weblion/weblion/FacultyStaffDirectory/tags/2.0/examples/FacultyStaffDirectoryExtender/README.txt.

Further reading

Further (and more up-to-date) documentation is availiable on the
"WebLion wiki":https://weblion.psu.edu/trac/weblion/wiki/FacultyStaffDirectory

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. Suggestions?

Future Plans

* Replacing the templates with Zope 3 views

* Integration with CMFBibliographyAT

* Vitae templates

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.

Thanks

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

Support

* Please report bugs to the
"WebLion issue tracker":https://weblion.psu.edu/trac/weblion/newticket?component=FacultyStaffDirectory&version=2.0.

* More documentation:https://weblion.psu.edu/trac/weblion/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.

This document is written using the Structured Text format for conversion
into alternative formats.

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