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Welcome the Service Learning Skill Session Web Development
Web page components
- Content (HTML)
- Layout/Design (HTML, CSS, Page Templates, JavcaScripts .....)
- Dynamic generation of information (Programming languajes (Perl, Python, JavaScripts, php)
- Databases: Banks accounts, Amazon, Froogle
- Show different information to users based on their roles
- Security and access control has been a question in developing web sites
- Workflows (requiered in most of the new websites)
What is Zope?
Zope is an open source application server for building content management systems, intranets, portals, and custom applications. The Zope community consists of hundreds of companies and thousands of developers all over the world, working on building the platform and Zope applications. Zope is written in Python, a highly-productive, object-oriented scripting language.
What is a CMS?
Just what is a content management system, anyway?
A content management system, or CMS, is a web application designed to make it easy for non-technical users to add, edit and, well, manage a website.
Not only do content management systems help website users with content editing, they also take care of a lot of "behind the scenes" work such as:
- Automatically generate navigation elements
- Making content searchable and indexable
- Keeping track of users, their permissions and security settings
- And much, much more.
What is Plone?
Plone is a content management framework that works hand-in-hand and sits on top of Zope, a widely-used Open Source web application server and development system. To use Plone, you don't need to learn anything about Zope; to develop new Plone content types, a small amount of Zope knowledge is helpful, and it is covered in the documentation.
Plone runs on Windows, Linux, BSD, Mac OS X, and many other platforms; double-click installers are available for Windows and Mac OS X, and RPM packages are available for Linux. For full information, see Download.
Why use a Content Management System (CMS)?
The easiest way to understand a CMS like Plone is to compare it with a standard web site design tool, like Macromedia Dreamweaver. In both cases pages can be produced on a remote computer, and submitted for approval and publication. There are, however, four key differences:
- In a CMS, any user with the required permission can produce web pages from anywhere, using any standard browser, with no need for any specialist software. A CMS is easier to use than Dreamweaver and FTP, therefore very little training is needed, and many more production tasks can be allocated to unskilled staff. As a consequence, a CMS empowers more users to create and edit content on the Web. Also, less training and lower skills result in lower production and maintenance costs.
- In a CMS pages are produced by typing text and uploading files into the site's pre-produced templates. This results in a more consistent corporate style. Thus, even though the number of people producing web pages for direct publication can be large, consistency of style and, more importantly, consistency in content structure is ensured.
- The control of workflow in a CMS can be very finely grained, with the Webmaster's job being effectively devolved to many people working in different places without any lowering of security and, more generally, of quality standards.
- Most CMS allow the saving of successive versions of the same document, resulting in a natural audit trail when required.