[Actionchix] Moving to Plone

jennyw jennyw at dangerousideas.com
Thu May 18 01:17:27 EST 2006


Yep, importing into Plone is up next. Well, actually, we found a step
that has to happen first -- information architecture.

The more we've looked at the original documents, the more it's looking
like the moving of content into Plone will be a manual process, maybe
assisted by automation where it makes sense (but that's looking less an
less likely).  Although we've been able to automatically convert the
original markup to xhtml, the result is still problematic.  The main
reason is that for a conversion script to work, you need to know not
only what you're converting from, but what you're converting to. The
original idea of just converting to xhtml and doing a little bit of
cleanup was overly optimistic.  ;-)  For some pages (like the profiles) it
was helpful, but for some others we ended up with valid xhtml that's not
semantically correct and not accessible. For example, the FAQ documents
use a tables and definition lists for indentation (and sometimes
definition lists are used properly as definition lists; it's not
consistent).  It'd be really hard to write a conversion routine to
choose which sections should use ordered lists, blockquotes, etc.  If
there were thousands of documents it might be worth trying to automate
the process, but since we're looking at considerably fewer than that, a
manual process would probably be best.

To facilitate that, Chris has started a style guide. Since there haven't
been too many takers (well, one) since we asked on ActionChix for people
who were interested in working on this, we've been discussing this
mostly on the phone. If more people are interested, of course let us
know. The document(s) will include:

* Proposed standards that apply to all pages.

* A list of the different content types (which can optionally be defined
as Plone content types).

* Proposed structure for each of the content types.

* Propose a standard URL naming scheme.

* A structure for organizing the documents (e.g. folder structure).

* Proposed merger of documents (for example, the mailing list FAQs).

* Proposed navigation.

* Propose a way of documenting transition

This information architecture step is a necessary precursor to import,
but at the same time will overlap design somewhat, which is why it's
only a proposal.

Jen

Mary Gardiner wrote:
> Well, the new server is go. This means, as best I can tell, that the
> next thing we should do is move the content into Plone, and since Chris
> was working on making the structure consistent, do that at the same
> time.
>
> The last step will be applying the new design as a Plone skin and then
> hand site maintainence back to the volunteers list.
>
> (And when I say last step, we may well launch new projects, such as
> easy hosting for chapters... :) )
>
> -Mary
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>   


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