On 3/18/06, Amy Stephen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > How about Centre? < > http://www.miller-group.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=37&Itemid=46 > > Anyone familiar with this? Runs PostgreSQL (I think any SQL DB but they > indicate a preference for PostGreSQL, Apache Web server and PHP. Looks like > add-ons and support are where you pay, but still MUCH cheaper than SIMS.
I'm a bit familiar with it. Centre is open source, but they don't really use the open source development process. That is, they give you access to the source code, but they aren't really trying to involve developers from outside their company. Since our experience has been that it is very difficult to get outside contributions for this kind of unsexy work anyhow, this is perhaps a reasonable approach, but it is more limited than the scope of our ambition. I did get an email that seemed to indicate that one of the Centre developers had left the company and seemed to be fishing for clients of his own, so that could be a second company built around Centre, which could lead to a loosening of the process, or perhaps a more open fork. Time will tell. > How does one determine where development is at? Following a series of visits to our partner schools and developers, I'm preparing an general update and revised roadmap. I'll send it to the list in the first half of next week. > I am not a Zope 3 developer. > Do you need to learn Zope 3 to work with it? Less than you used to. In fact, I'm worried that people who want to get into the project are getting too bogged down in trying to learn plain Zope 3 first, which takes them down some dark alleys that they might be able to avoid. We could use some documentation on useful things one can do (improving UI issues by working on page templates, for example) that don't require much Zope 3 voodoo. > Where do you point your > newbies? What help is the community looking for? What are the jobs we can do > to speed up development? The biggest thing we need right now, that people who aren't Zope 3 hackers can likely contribute, is a rethinking of the organization of SchoolTool's web UI. In particular, to NOT start from our calendar-oriented state and think up some tweaks, but to start from scratch on what a teacher, student, clerk, school administrator, or parent should see when they log in. We've just had programmers working on the application (not designers) for the past six months or so, and I seem to be particularly bad at directing this aspect of the development, so some discussion and proposals about how to address the structure of the web UI would be helpful at this point. --Tom _______________________________________________ Schooltool mailing list [email protected] http://lists.schooltool.org/mailman/listinfo/schooltool
