Tom - You have given me much to think about and I will read, digest and be
back in touch. I am very hopeful, given your information, that I should be
able to help. And that is EXCITING! Thanks, much!
Amy
----Original Message Follows----
From: "Tom Hoffman" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Amy Stephen" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
CC: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [schooltool] Install help
Date: Sat, 18 Mar 2006 17:18:44 -0500
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
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