Introduction

Contents

2. Features

3. Available modules

4. Supported languages

5. Wish List

6. Useful Website@School sites

7. References

8. History

9. To conclude

1. Introduction

1.1 The rock-bottom assumptions

• Jürgen Habermas (1929- ), and his 'Theory of Communicative Action'.
  intro_jurgen_habermas.jpg

  "Habermas is a philosopher and sociologist in the tradition of critical theory and American pragmatism. He is best known for his work on the concept of the public sphere, which he has based in his theory of communicative action." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%BCrgen_Habermas

• Donald Knuth (1938- ), American computer scientist and his 'The Art of Computer Programming'.
  intro_donald_knuth.jpg

  "Donald Knuth is a renowned computer scientist and Professor Emeritus at Stanford University. Author of the seminal multi-volume work The Art of Computer Programming ("TAOCP"), Knuth has been called the "father" of the analysis of algorithms..." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Knuth

• Célestin Freinet (1896-1966), and Paolo Freire (1921-1997).
  A French pedagogue and educational reformer and a Brazilian educator and influential theorist on education are our indispensable guides when thinking about a website learing tool for education. Almost a hundred years ago Freinet already saw the possibilities of modern technologies in the hands of students for real life learning and communication, while Freires thoughts on reciprocity fit in the Open Source philosopy.
  celestin_freinet.jpg         paolo_freire.jpg

  Concepts of Freinet's pedagogy: - Pedagogy of work (pédagogie du travail): students were encouraged to learn by making products or providing services. - Enquiry-based learning (tâtonnement expérimental): group-based trial and error work. - Cooperative learning (travail coopératif): students co-operate in the production process. - Centers of interest (complexes d'intérèt): the children's interests and natural curiosity are starting points for a learning process. - The natural method (méthode naturelle): authentic learning by using real experiences of children. - Democracy: children learn to take responsibility for their own work and for the whole community by using democratic self government. (excerpts from Wikipedia)

  [...] challenging is Freire's strong aversion to the teacher-student dichotomy. This dichotomy is admitted in Rousseau and constrained in Dewey, but Freire comes close to insisting that it should be completely abolished. This is hard to imagine in absolute terms, since there must be some enactment of the teacher-student relationship in the parent-child relationship, but what Freire suggests is that a deep reciprocity be inserted into our notions of teacher and student. Freire wants us to think in terms of teacher-student and student-teacher; that is, a teacher who learns and a learner who teaches, as the basic roles of classroom participation. [...]. (exerpts from Wikipedia)

1.1.1 Main design viewpoints

• A school CMS must be a place where students can learn. Learn to create and publish texts, learn management tasks and administrative skills, experience markup languages, run and ruin their own style sheets and learn basics of coding. On every level, from writing their first text to writing code, a school CMS must be a learning tool for students.
• The website of a school needs special qualities. It differs from the home site of the Jones family and also it's certainly not the site of an enterprise or a business. A school is not a company. These notions require features that differ from most other (fine) CMSes.
• A school website is the place on the Internet where students, teachers, faculty, parents, the School Board, several committees and other parties can find a place to express themselves and communicate with all kinds of visitors. A school CMS must enable all these stakeholders to use the CMS for their purposes. A school CMS must take care of all their cultural differences and similarities in the way they express themselves and communicate with their sometimes special audiences.
• Most schools are not that rich. Websites of schools must be managed and maintained by many persons. All of them have little or no experience as webmaster, HTML expert or systems administator. Often a school is mainly managed by hard working female teachers who like to teach, and not to manage some CMS. These circumstances call for a very secure, robust and stable but KISS (Keep it Simple & Straightforward) CMS for all those users, and last but not least also for whizzkid students, eager to investigate a CMS.
• A school CMS needs excellent documentation. A comprehensive user manual. Furthermore, extensive developer documentation and last but not least, well documented, well written code. All of them written for their respective audiences.
• Visually impaired and blind persons not only have the right on accessible websites, they also have rights on accesible CMS management.

1.1.2 What students can learn

• International cooperation. When schools use Website@School each user can work with the CMS her preferredl anguage.
• Experiment in a safe environment where it is possible to make mistakes -the basis of learning- without harming the school CMS.
• All incoming materials are checked for viruses (see requirements).
• Create and publish content.
• Learn HTML markup language in the plain HTML editor.
• Learn CSS with stylesheets that students can manage themselves.
• Gain hands on CMS management experience in a safe environment.
• Learn to work in project teams. Learn to collaborate.
• Visually impaired and blind students can manage Website@School with screen reader and braille terminal.

1.1.3 User requirements

1.2 The Website@School teams

1.2.1 Core team

1.2.2 Translators

Manual translators
Rieks van Rooijen, Karin Abma, Jean Peyratout, Anouk Coumans, Marjolaine Audoux.

Your language here?
Yes! You can translate Website@School and help students, teachers and parents in your country. It is easy to do, if you have basic computer skills and know your own language and another. Please mail to translators at websiteatschool dot eu. You can give yourself a swift start bij reading 3. Translate Tool of the manual.

1.2.3 Code

- Frederico Caldeira Knabben and his FCKeditor. Frederico's site can be found at http://ckeditor.com/. The FCK editor is distributed under the GPL, LGPL and MPL open source licenses. This triple copyleft licensing model avoids incompatibility with other open source licenses.
- Ger Versluis for his HV Menu which is used in the Rosalina theme. We tried to get in touch with Ger to ask his kind permission to use his code, but we received no reaction. @ Ger: please contact us.

1.2.4 Graphics

1.2.5 Donators

1.2.6 Testers

1.2.7 Others

(top)

2. Features

• OS/OSS/GPL: Open Standards, Open Source Software under a General Public License.
• Focus on security, robustness and stability.
• Excellent, richly illustrated (with alt tags for blind users) comprehensive documentation targeted at the school users ensures a flat learning curve. The User's Guide is a context sensitive help function in the program.
• Blind or visually impaired webmasters manage Website@School with braille terminal and screen reader. No frames and almost no javascript are used. No mouse needed.
• Mouseover texts. Short information texts or pointers to keyboard shortcuts are almost everywhere.
• Excellent developer documentation created with phpDocumentor.
• Well written, readable code.
• Unlimited number of Areas ('websites' in Website@School). If needed everyone can have their own website.
• Areas can be split into new areas, or merged. Sectons and pages can be moved around to other areas and sections. These features enable quick changes to any new site structure.
• Unlimited number of password protected Intranets.
• Unlimited depth in sections, subsections, subsubsections, et cetera.
• Sections and pages can be images, thus permitting navigation and use for analphabetics or young children.
• Easy installaton (also for blind users) with a well dcoumentend GUI (Graphical User Interface) and additional Users' Guide documentation. No need to install anything on a computer. Webiste@School only uses a browser.
• Fine grainded Role Based Access Control (RBAC). Each area, section or page can have its own admin(s) with permisions from 'none' to 'everything'.
• BSS (Bazaar Style Style, an educational implementation of CSS) permitting unlimited differences in styles by user editable style sheets in areas, sections and pages.
• Pages have metadata and can be visible, hidden, read-only, under embargo- and expiry dates and can directly link to URL's.
• Alerts on 'everything' for 'everyone'.
• Groups of users with different group permissions (Unix style). This enables collaboration and project based work.
• Virus scanning on all incoming materials (provided the server has a virusscanner). Clamscan is automatically detected. Lists of permitted file extensions.
• Translate Tool: Easy translation to new languages or adaption of program text strings by technically unexperienced translators.
• Demonstration data. Website@School can be installed with demo data (demo Areas, users and groups) in every available language. Useful for experiments and learning to manage Website@School. Easily removable.
• Easy database backup.
• Easy upgrading and maintenance with the Update Manager.
• Extensive logging and status reproting with cut & paste for error reporting via e-mail.
• Proxy friendly URLs (configurable), to save bandwidth. Interesting for schools having no fast connection to the Internet.
• Full UTF-8, i.e. no problems with diacritical marks as well as non-western characters.
• Breadcrumb trails with some intelligence (reduces mouseclicks).
• And much, much more, please see the chapters in the Table of Contents. Each chapter has it's own features.

(top)

3. Available modules

• WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get ) editor.
• Plain HTML editor.
• Sitemap: for all areas, one area or links to other areas.
• Image album: (requested by many; available soon)
• Tv module: A kind of message board that shows everything in school (available soon)

(top)

4. Supported languages

Manual Website@School

- English (complete)
- Dutch (under construction)
- Spanish (under constructionn)
- French (under construction)
Latest versions of the chapters can be found on http://wyxs.net/web/was

Check our http://websiteatschool.eu site to see if new languages are available that are not yet incorporated in Website@School.

You can help schools in your country by translating Website@School. The system provides an easy Tanslate Tool for 'on the fly' translations Translate Tool Manual.

(top)

5. Wishlist

• Please help other schools by translating Website@School in your language. We have a special Translate Tool that enables online translations. Creating a new language version is a piece of cake.
• Help us with feature requests.
• Help schools with developing and coding for Website@School.
• Please donate to the project. Your school can help to keep your school site sustainable. We welcome financial support of the project. See Donate to Website@School
• E-mail us the URL of your site. You can use the E-mail link at the bottom of the Home Welcome page in Website@School Start Center.
• Do you have wishes? Please mail us.

(top)

6. Useful Website@School sites

• Main project site: http://websiteatschool.eu.
• Joinup: Our download location at https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/software/websiteatschool/release/all.
• Manuals: http://manual.websiteatschool.eu
• Latest manuals:
  http://wyxs.net/web/was/
• Joinup project page: https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/software/websiteatschool/home.
• Mailing lists: New versions will be announced via https://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/websiteatschool-announce.
• Support: FAQ, Email support and other questions, info, latest news on updates, see our main site.
• Sourceforge project site: http://sourceforge.net/projects/websiteatschool.
  We do not provide downloads of Website@School via Sourceforge because of the Terms of Use from which we quote:

  Encryption

  You are aware that all postings of open source encryption code controlled under U.S. Export Control Classification Number (ECCN) 5D002 must be simultaneously reported by email to the U.S. government. You are responsible for submitting this email report to the U.S. government in accordance with procedures described in: http://www.bis.doc.gov/encryption/PubAvailEncSourceCodeNofify.html and Section 740.13(e) of the Export Administration Regulations ("EAR") 15 C.F.R. Parts 730-772.
  Source: http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/sitelegal/wiki/Terms_of_Use

  Website@School may or may not contain cryptographic code depending on the definition of 'crypographic'. We do not have the time nor the inclination to invest our valuable time in researching whether we do or do not (or worse: maybe do) need to comply with rules and regulations that may or may not be compatible with those that are not completely foreign to us.

• BerliOS download site: To our regret we had to abandon this download location because BerliOS now also uses the Sourceforge infrastructure.
  Website@School can now be downloaded from Joinup.

(top)

7. References

• Jürgen Habermas: The Theory of Communicative Action. Translated by Thomas McCarthy, Cambridge: Polity (published 1984), ISBN 0807015067. Advice: find a summary that is readable before starting with 'The blue monster'. More on: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_of_Communicative_Action
• Donald Ervin Knuth: The Art of Computer Programming. For experts. More on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Computer_Programming
• Eric Steven Raymond: The Art of Unix Programming. The first chapters are are quite readable and very interesting for a layperson. It can be found on http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/.
• B. W. Kernighan and P. J. Plauger: The Elements of Programming Style, 2nd Edition, McGraw Hill, New York, 1978. ISBN 0-07-034207-5
• Ross J. Anderson: 'Security Engineering: A Guide to Building Dependable Distributed Systems, Wiley Computer Publishing, Some chapters can be read online via http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/book.html
• On Célestin Freinet and Paolo Freire. Tons of materials can be found on the Internet. Wikipedia is your friend.
  Freinet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%C3%A9lestin_Freinet#External_links
  Freirre: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paulo_Freire

(top)

8. History

intro_good_code.png

Since we had years of experience with Site@School - now no longer supported: unmanageable, unmaintainable, insecure, low code quality- there was little need to change requirements. In that way Site@School was an excellent prototype. We only had to add long needed educational features that were impossible to incorporate in old Site@School.

[1]: Courtesy Mr. Randall Munroe of xkcd.com who permits using his comics for this use. Source: http://m.xkcd.com/844/.

(top)

8. To conclude

(top)