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.