Virtual School History Website

[John Simkin]

The new Virtual School History website can be found at:

http://cms.eun.org/ww/en/pub/virtual_school/index.htm

Most of the new material cannot be viewed (needs to be uploaded by VS).

However, I have been working on the following projects Olympic Games and Aviation.

[John Simkin]

I have added a new section on Virtual School newsletters.

[Dalibor Svoboda]

Yesterday I upploded at the webpage all articles about education and ICT. I did create a new sublevel at Resources called "Articles" where these are placed.

Today I will do the same with "Notices".

Edited May 23, 2004 by Dalibor Svoboda

[Anders MacGregor-Thunell]

I have kept the minutes, noted the problems and been a great deleter at this meeting. I have also worked with the organization of this meeting which included some basic information of the new CMS system. At the new site I have worked with editing and documents concerning some of our projects...

Edited May 23, 2004 by Anders

[Guest]

Out of interest, how easy, flexible and successful are the new templates for uploading materials? What sort of platform is it?

[Richard Jones-Nerzic]

Out of interest, how easy, flexible and successful are the new templates for uploading materials? What sort of platform is it?

Cold Fusion from a German company http://www.contens.de/ww/de/pub/enterprise...-management.htm

It is down at the moment

How easy? Might be very easy eventually but obviously restricted in terms of design and style. At the moment it seems that the VS admin staff have deactivated aspects of it. We are unable to immediately change all the pages.

[Guest]

Out of interest, how easy, flexible and successful are the new templates for uploading materials? What sort of platform is it?

Cold Fusion from a German company http://www.contens.de/ww/de/pub/enterprise...-management.htm

It is down at the moment

How easy? Might be very easy eventually but obviously restricted in terms of design and style. At the moment it seems that the VS admin staff have deactivated aspects of it. We are unable to immediately change all the pages.

Interesting. Hopefully it will at least in part solve some problems. I imagine there are different permission levels - in my experience with similar products this is the most important aspect to get right from the start - who can do what and where? - you need a dialogue with the top brass to get what you want.

Have fun guys I'm off to the golf course in the sun

[John Simkin]

Out of interest, how easy, flexible and successful are the new templates for uploading materials? What sort of platform is it?

The main point it is more difficult than it needs to be. For example, it is more difficult than Dreamweaver to use. I therefore expect few Virtual School members to upload content. If this happens the venture will not be successful.

The only way we have worked out how to use it is by five people working together (four with their own websites and therefore bringing considerable experience to solving these problems).

However, it has been a highly enjoyable few days. The company, trips out, food and drink have all been excellent. We have also had a lot of laughs with the highlight being the visit to the photographic studio yesterday. It will give you all a good laugh when the photograph is published on the website.

[Nico Zijlstra]

Yesterday I prepared pages within the ' projects' section: Ötzi the Iceman, an activity for 10-12 year olds.

Also a start was made with my propaganda project.

Today I paste a hotpotatoes quiz into a page: not successful

But putting content in this site is one of the main points in my 'to do list'.

Special attention I'll pay to the technical side of this CMS:

I got a telephone number of Bart Vanhulle in Brussels, an EUN technician. I'll contact him and see how we can work together and build up contact with Contens, the German CMS-firm.

Edited May 23, 2004 by N. Zijlstra

[Nico Zijlstra]

I imagine there are different permission levels - in my experience with similar products this is the most important aspect to get right from the start - who can do what and where? - you need a dialogue with the top brass to get what you want.

The EUN people distribute permissions: so far Anders Mac-Gregor is the only one in the History Department with permissions. (We share his codes for the moment )

Anders has got all permission levels within his profile in the VS HD, except for 'full' access. We've applied for permissions at the same level as Anders for all VS HD members. We have decided on the parts of the website in which we'll be active though.

Edited May 23, 2004 by N. Zijlstra

[Guest]

The main point it is more difficult than it needs to be. For example, it is more difficult than Dreamweaver to use. I therefore expect few Virtual School members to upload content. If this happens the venture will not be successful.

That's a shame because there are some really good platforms which will perform all you want and more at a very reasonable price - pages, file sharing, forums, messengers etc. and are much easier than Dreamweaver to use.

The best one I have experience of can be found HERE.

[Dan Moorhouse]

For multi-user sites who need to have a number of people accessing, writing and uploading there's always Macromedia Contribute2. You can easily set permission levels for full, limited or no write permissions to differnet sections of a site. Its based on dreamweaver in many ways, obviously, being a macromedia product, bthough users really don't need to have any particularly high levels of knowledge of html - indeed, all they need to know is how to type in a box and hit submit, the rest is done for the user. For the more technological stuff a user CAN override that simplistic approach and insert whatever coding etc. they would use in Dreamweaver etc.

Doesn't cost much either, a friend of mine uses it as part of his ICT business and he reckons his expenses when setting up a contribute2 based site are only in the region of £150 for licences etc. Probably cheaper than getting Dreamweaver on the PC's of all the contributors...

[Andrew Field]

I'd second what Dan says - apart from one thing - Contribute 2 (despite massive improvements from version 1) is still very slow - even connections via broadband take too long.

It can also get very irritating with a number of people using Contribute 2 on one site as you have to 'check out' files as you work on them. If someone doesn't check the file back in, or something goes wrong, it can be a real source of irritation to update.

I planned on using it for the school website, allowing select individuals to update relevant sections. I had to give up.

Now, the may be - and probably is - because I created the site in Frontpage and we have a terrible internet connection in school. However, both things are highlighted in the promotional materials as not being a problem.

I now plan to totally redesign the site to make it quicker to update and we're finally getting a quick connection. I'll see how it goes then.

[Marco Koene]

At my school one of our technicians developed his own cms. It is easy to use and has all the functions one needs. Have a look at www.veurs.nlto see what has been created with this cms.

[Dalibor Svoboda]

Content of the letter I sent to Anne Gilleran and Chui Hsia a few moments ago:

The Hist.dep. meeting in Gothenburg went very well. Most of the time did we work with Content Manager System moving articles and other materials from old site to the new one.

Some members discovered different technical problems which we are describing in the minutes from the meeting. I hope that these problems will be eliminated fast.

Today I tried to continue the work at the new Hist.dep. site but I was not let in. Is the CMS system down? For how long period of time?

When will the members of VS departments obtain their own logging authorization? It should be done fairly soon. After all the management of Virtual School intentions are to have this new site running during month of May.

Dalibor