[Zope] OSES project - should it run under Zope?

[Martin Dougiamas]

Cees de Groot wrote:
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> I was off this list for the last half year or so, so I'm in for some catching
> up :-). In the meantime, a couple of quick questions:
> 
> I'm starting up a new project, Open Source Educational Software (www.oses.org
> for more details). Basically, I want to get people from various disciplines
> (teachers, pedagogues, graphics artists, programmers) together to work on
> classroom-software. The site must be highly collaborative, and friendly to
> non-technical users. Software will be mostly written in Java, so it can run on
> any box with a browser.

Heh.  I've been working for six months on something very similar (but not Java).

It's called Moodle (http://moodle.com).  There's not much public on the site 
yet, but I've been testing a prototype course with 100 students behind the scenes.
When that's done and I have some results, the site will be opened up (few weeks).

> Q1: is Zope the best environment to do this on? On the collaboration part,
> Zope's user features are great, and Confera is ok as well, but other things
> are lacking (chat, public file repositories, interfaces to CVS maybe, talkback
> areas at the bottom of most pages, etcetera).

I built these quite easily within Zope (except Chat, which is Java and C).

> Q3: if the answer on Q1 is "yes", are there any Zope gurus out there who want
> to help me on structuring the site, maybe writing some of the utilities that
> are missing? One of the reasons for picking Zope is that I'm considering
> making the add-ons for collaboration available as part of the project, so that
> schools can run Zope (Zope fits the OSES requirements for platform
> independence, that's a very big benefit).

Well, you can join my project soon if you want.  :-)  ;-)

Cheers,
Martin
--
### Martin Dougiamas -- Internet Agent  
### Centre for Educational Advancement 
### http://cea.curtin.edu/staff/martin