Developments I'd like to see in Plone

After a really useful conversation with Nick and Jeff in the web team yesterday and some useful comments on my The automated feeds are working post (including one from Alexander Limi, the co-founder of Plone) I thought I'd put up another Plone post (my second ever).

I'm not a techie, but I have been using Plone now for more than four years so I know it pretty well from a user's perspective. Whilst there's no such thing as a perfect system I really like Plone and the ethos behind it, I especially like the flexibility of the sharing permissions that it gives us. The web team here at Leicester have done a great job in setting it up and supporting it with very limited resources (and for the record, they should get more).

So, here are some of the developments I'd like to see in the future (apologies in advance if I'm making any techie faux pas).

Selectively cascading portlets

In versions 2 and 2.5 of Plone the portlets were created as pages and you could just point to them from the relevant folder level and so have one portlet selectively cascading at different levels of the site. This system was a little complicated to use but it did give good flexibility and avoided having to create the same portlet multiple times at different levels. In version 3 it seems to be all or nothing - I can block or unblock the portlets above in the folder structure but I can't say 'do block this one but don't block this one'. Consequently, for example, the Contact us portlet on our site has to recreated six times futher down in the structure to allow different teams to have the same Contact us portlet but more specific news and events collection portlets.

Thumbnail images from news items into Facebook

I've set up news items to push out to Twitter and Facebook using the RSS and Twitterfeed (see this post for the Twitterfeed set up). What would be nice though would be if Plone could take a thumbnail of an image attached to a news item and put that in the Facebook post. Currently it doesn't do this so all our automated posts look very similar (look for the posts that come from Twitterfeed on our Facebook page)

NOT statement in collection fields

Within the Title and Description fields in collections it would be really useful if it allowed more logical statements. At the moment you can have AND and OR but not NOT. And NOT would allow more flexibility.

More flexibility in the start date field in collections

In order ro push out events to Facebook and Twitter I use a collection to create an appropriate RSS feed. However, I don't want to push out events to these networks as soon as they are published because often we schedule events as a block a term in advance. So to get round this I've set up collections with the following criteria:

• Item type = event
• Location = (relevant folder + search sub-folders)
• State = published
• Start date = 1 day, in the future, on the day

This works ok but it only lets me push out events the day before...

I've just looked at the criteria again and it looks like I should just be able change the 'which day' field to 2 days or 5 days or a week. That looks like it should solve my problem but I think I tried that before and it didn't work. I set it up more than six months ago though so I can't remember. I'll have another check but if anyone can tell me so I don't have to check that would be great :)

Bookmarklets

I understand there's an addon for bookmarklets (share on Twitter, Delicous, Facebook etc)  but it conflicts with the feed mixer portlet. It would be good to get this fixed.

Editor bugs

I prefer the TinyMCE editor to Kupu, on the whole, but there's a bug in TinyMCE which means that if you add a link to an image in a portlet the image dissapears (but works fine with Kupu editor).

I've probably got some other suggestions but I'll just throw those out as a starter. It's not meant to be critical - just suggestions from an avid user.

Engaging without invading at ALDinHE

This is an update on the draft of the workshop that I'll be running with Becka Currant on 31 March at the Association for Learning Development in Higher Education conference.

Thank you to all of you who commented on my draft - it was really helpful. The comments especially prompted me to think through the difference between using existing versus new networks, which is the major difference between mine and Becka's approach in using social media to promote student engagement.

In addition to talking through the updated slides below I'm going to make sure that I explain in more detail:

• RSS (thanks for the comment Brendan)
• Twitterfeed
• Hootsuite

We're still a little unsure of how much we're going to get participants using the tools (as per Steve's comment I'm a bit cautious about it) - it depends what they're current level of knowledge/suspicion is.

Changes to the slides (which you can see below) from last time include:

• an opening question to find out something of the attitude of workshop participants to using social media for student engagement ('I'm already using it', 'I'd like to but don't know where to start', 'I'm very suspicious of using it')
• the addition of Ning to encompass Becka's approach at Bradford
• adding a column for the USA population as per Brendan's comment
• a slide summarising the differences between existing versus new networks
• a slide on tone of voice as per Jo's comment
• I've added a creative commons logo and listed it as such in the slide details

Engaging Without Invading

View more presentations from Stuart Johnson.

This is going to be a much better workshop thanks to eveyone's comments - so thanks very much!

Automating events notification

After last week's Friday afternoon blogpost on how I'm using RSS, Twitterfeed, Twitter and Facebook to engage with our students, I thought I'd write a follow up.

Up until now I've only connected up our news item RSS feeds to Twitterfeed but I haven't connected up our events RSS feeds. The reason for this is that some of our events (e.g. our workshop programme) we publish in bulk at the beginning of term and so RSS out from these wouldn't work in a timely fashion. Then I had an idea (just as I was trying to get to sleep) - what about creating a collection portlet on our website (Plone) and set the criteria to only display events that are 24 hours in the future. Then if the RSS from this collection was connected to Twitterfeed the events would appear automatically on our Twitter account 24 hours before they happen, which in turn would appear on our Facebook fan page. All of which would neatly feed in to our followers' news feeds without me having to do anything (or without having to pester other people to do anything).

So this is the criteria I set in the Plone collection item:

• Item type = Event
• Location = [relevant folder]
• State = Published
• Start date (and this is the bit that makes it work in a timely fashion) = 1 day/in the future/on the day

And to my considerable astonishment it worked!

So now we'll be letting students know of events, via Twitter and Facebook, 24 hours before the events happen, without having to do anything. And whilst this clearly doesn't stop the need for conversation - it does help facilitate it.

Trying hard to connect

I thought I should write something about how I'm using Twitter and Facebook in Student Development at the University of Leicester. Two important things to say first:

1. I'm not saying we're doing it perfectly - I just want to let people know what we're doing and invite comment. Some things are going well and some things could definitely do with improving - I'd be interested to know your thoughts
2. I've had a lot of advice, some of it inferred from how I see people using Twitter and Facebook and some of it direct advice (thanks especially to @caffeinebomb, @ajcann, @fawcettbj and @thisisdavid)

What are we doing?

We're trying to connect with students in order to make them aware of the services we offer to help them in their studies and their career planning. I've recently revamped the Student Development website to make it more dynamic by adding lots of RSS feeds to get news articles out. The other thing I'm trying to do is to connect up to people's social spaces using Twitter and Facebook.

Broadcasting (the easy bit)

The easy bit (although it took a bit of thought to connect it all up) is broadcasting. I didn't want to have to do this manually so I've automated it using a combination of RSS, Twitter, Twitterfeed, Facebook and a Facebook application called selective Twitter status (see 'How are we doing it?', below).

Conversation (the more difficult bit)

The more difficult bit is actually having conversations with people, and this is the bit we need to work on more. Having conversations takes time and resources but is the bit that makes the biggest difference. I'm using Hootsuite to allow multiple users to tweet to our uolsd account. Hootsuite took a bit of figuring out but is great now we've got the hang of it. The people who tweet to the account are me plus our Helpdesk staff - these are PhD students who work for us on a casual basis in our Student Development Zone. We need to work on this more because the PhD students haven't used Twitter before, and we also need to get a consistent voice. Generally speaking we are being reactive, responding to requests, rather than proactive. As we follow more people though we should begin to see more people who we can help. I am trying to follow only University of Leicester students who first follow us - that way we are a) responding to the needs of our students and b) hopefully it doesn't feel like we're stalking them(!).

How are we doing it?

The diagram above shows how it works.

• the RSS feeds from our news items are fed into Twitterfeed
• Twitterfeed is connected up to our Twitter account and so automatically tweets our RSS-ed news items
• Facebook's selective Twitter status application picks up the tweets and posts them in our Facebook fan page (this is achieved by adding the suffix '#fb' at the end of the tweet in the advanced options for the feed within Twitterfeed (see below)

And that's it! We're slowly building up a bit of a following - currently 201 followers on Twitter and 147 fans of our Facebook page. We have a link to our Twitter and Facebook information on every page of our website, along with a bit of an explanation, which you can see here.

That's a bit rushed but I'd be interested in your comments and suggestions.