June 17 - 19 , Organising content in Plone - London, UK

We have taught content organisation on a regular basis to participants from many companies and institutions in Sweden over the last seven years. We are now trying to combine this knowledge with Plone, to deliver a course on Plone and content organisation.

We held this course for the first time in London in May last year, and it was well received.

"I found the Plone course to be very helpful and I gained a lot of useful knowledge, that I can use now and in the future. The tutor's relaxed and attentive manner makes the course easy to follow. 5 out of 5"

(Name withheld due to company policy of participant)

Target group

• People responsible for the design and organisation of content on a Plone site,
• Project leaders and decision makers
• Developers with design responsibility

You should also value general "connect-the dots" knowledge. From experience we know that this kind of course is less popular with people who only want hands-on knowledge.

Introduction
Design can often seem to be an area where it is very hard to tell who is right and who is wrong, and what makes one design better than another one. This is of course a problem, since the stakes are high in terms of usability and utility of the Web site/Intranet system. Our approach in teaching content organisation is about:

1. How humans view, structure and act on content
2. What user interface conventions are used to communicate content (including Web 2.0)
3. How content is marked up and retrieved  (Types of Classification systems)
4. How to test if one site works better than another

We integrate this with Plone.

Contents
 

The different parts of Plone and how they work together
As an introduction, a summary of the different parts that make up a Plone web site, how they interact together and how different designs can be implemented using them.

• The document (content types)
  • Using the editor
  • Including images
  • Including Attachments
  • Uploading and image
  • Uploading an attachment
  • Bulk upload of images and attachments
  • Converting and integrating MS Office documents

• Using keywords
• The Workflow and what it can do
• Content types & fields
• Organising the site into folders
• Rules in Plone 3
• The smart folder and how to use it
  • How to set different search criteria
• Using RSS to keep check on a part of the site, and on the smart folders

Sharing the workload

• Give rights to users and groups to publish in part of the web site

Examples of Products

• PloneArticle
• Quills Blog
• Photo Album
• ZWiki

Information design - Organising content

Limits of the human eye - design decisions in Plone

Limits of the human memory- design decisions in Plone

Planning and structuring - Gulf of execution and gulf of evaluation

Three ways of making your web site popular

• Deep content
• Fresh content
• Allow the user to commit

Icons

• Silhouettes
• Family likeness
• Size

Text

• Communicating in text
• x-height
• Line length

User Interfaces

• The hypertext interface
• The desktop interface
• Desktop interfaces are conquering the web through AJAX
• Hierarchy, depth, ortogonality
• Desktop integration
• Multimodal interfaces
• User interface design principles (perceived stability, user control, concrete->abstract...)

How to measure the performance of a design

• Number of errors
• Time to conclude

Five basic ways of organising information

• Time
• Space
• Category
• Continuum (ratings, weight, price)
• Alphabetical

Classification systems

• Controlled vocabularies
• Hierarchical classification systems (UDC)
• Thesauri (LSH)
• Facet oriented systems
• Folksonomies
• How to use these in Plone

Interconnect your site

• Newsfeeds
• Podcasts
• Social bookmarks
• Blog directories (e.g. Technorati)

Usability

• Decide first who you are (role)
• Set out what information you want, or what you want to accomplish at the site
• Go to the site
• Is it possible to find the information? Can you accomplish at the site what you set out to do?

Workshop
Evaluate and redesign a Plone site based on knowledge from the course