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Andy is employed at Bethel University as their web developer.  He primarily develops their content management system and applications built within it.  The CMS is based on Silva (as is this site!), which in turn is built on top of Zope. Zope (and Silva) are such a sweet paradigm/web app. platform to be building in.  And best of all, the use python as the programming language!

Anyways, I've written a few articles about developing in this platform.  The articles that primarily benefit Bethel were placed in the Bethel ITS Knowledgebase.  The ones that I wanted to follow me around I've placed on this site, or my Zope members page.  Here's a list of them:

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Bethel's CMS is a very organic thing, and I've built a number of Silva extensions to meet the needs of our environment.  The ones I've publically released are located on my Zope members page, and are listed here:

  1. SilvaRandomContentSource: This product provides a Random Content Code Source. This code source chooses a random item from a specified container and displays it. "Randomness" options are "on page load" and "on page load and every X seconds".
  2. SilvaCustomAutoTOC: This Automatic Table of Contents gives the silva content authors/editors the ability to choose which silva addables are displayed in the TOC.

  3. SilvaStylesheets: This product provides a Silva Stylesheet asset to the SMI. Stylesheets are editable through the SMI. The styles are split up into Style Sets, which are logical groupings of styles. Each Style Set contains common CSS selectors as found in Silva's frontend.css, as well as a few others selectors.

    This product opens up the styling of Silva sites to Authors+, within the SMI. For large companies like universities that have one basic look, and which allow individual departments to customize the look of the content of their site, this a perfect product.

    No longer do you need do site managers need to update stylesheets for the departments.

  4. SilvaDocumentPatches: This product contains patches to SilvaDocument that add more features and functionality than is provided in SilvaDocument. This product mainly deals with functionality enhancements of the SilvaDocument's forms-based editor/xmlwidgets, but has some additional features that go beyond this.
  5. XMLWidgets-pluggable: XMLWidgets was developed and still maintained by Infrae for use with Silva. It was patched to allow multiple xml widget roots. This allows one to create extension products which contain extra xml widget elements and can plug these elements into existing Content Types, like SilvaDocument. I'm using this in production to as part of the yet-to-be-released Silva Forms Extension.
    If you have no need or desire to create custom extensions for Silva, then you probably aren't interested in this product. There are also ways to add custom xml widgets to SilvaDocument that don't require this product, however I feel that it is easier to use this product than those methods.
  6. Tropos: This product is unreleased yet, awaiting a final version 2.0.  It provides advanced html forms support to the Silva forms-based editor.  If you want a preview of this, please email me.
  7. You can find previews and unreleased versions of certain products by visiting the 'Silva Products' section of this website.

Some products I've written I don't expect to publically release.  These are listed below, and if you want to try one, please email me.

  1. BethelNews: An extension of SilvaNews that provides newsletter capabilities, with customized output per user.  Newsletters can be scheduled to be published on a certain day.  The publishing process wil compose a unique email customized to the person's preferences for person listed in an xml file.  Preferences include html, text, pdf email format and what audiences the person wants to read.  The online html version also follows the audiences preferences.  Bethel is using this for their internal E-Announcements, and for the upcoming university newsletter, Bethel E-News.
  2. BethelSilva: Bethel-specific extensions to silva.  These include:
  3. BethelTemplates: a Silva-based public layout management system.  Templates are defined in the ZMI.  Silva containers have a new 'Template' tab, which allows authors to create a layout for that container which uses one of the pre-defined templates.  Templates have a set of preferences that are customizable per-container in it's Template tab.  Silva is currently VERY lacking in silva-centric layout management, and this product overcomes this. 

    This product also has a hierarchical Menu which we use to manage the left navigation menus of our content-managed websites.

    BethelTemplates are also usable outside of Silva.  We have a PortalAPI product which our non-zope web applications use (via SOAP) to pull the layout of their applications.  Bethel's ITS KB, and the library website use it, among a host of other external web applications.
  4. Multi-Document code source: This code source allows you to include a Silva Document in another Silva document, with CSS suppoer.  Great uses include: splitting your homepage into two panels; each panel is a separate document, adding a 'News Panel' to a page.

That's about it for cool techie zope articles and products.

Technology Stuff