Plone CMS

IMKE community portal can be used also as an Intranet (a Web space for internal publishing and document sharing among project partners) and groupware system (providing tools for communication, collaboration, time management and workflow management). IMKE portal is built with advanced Content Management System called Plone (see http://plone.org), which is free and open source software. Advanced manual for Plone CMS is available on the Web at http://docs.neuroinf.de/PloneBook/ch3.rst. IMKE portal is installed on a Web server of the Centre for Educational Technology (CET) in Tallinn University. In case of technical problems turn to the server administrator Vahur Rebas (vahur@tlu.ee, +372 6409 355) or head of CET Mart Laanpere (martl@tlu.ee, +372 5278 437).

Portal membership

Most of the IMKE portal content can be viewed by everyone, but if you want to access the internal documents and edit, add or comment the portal content you have to become a registered member of the portal.

Adding content

In order to add some content to IMKE portal, you should first log in to the system by entering your username and password on the front page of the portal (http://imke.tlu.ee).
You can add content objects in two different areas: public area (sections in the navigation menu on the left side) and your personal e-portfolio (accessible from the upper-left menu under the link My folder).

Adding content to your personal e-portfolio

Once logged in you will see a menu on the right upper area of the web page, where your login name is displayed and menu optios, among them 'My folder'.

After clicking 'My folder", another menu is displayed below with some pull-down menu options on the right side of the screen: Display, Add item and State.

Click on 'Add item' and just select the right content type (Folder, Page, File, News item or Event) from the pull-down menu. In most cases, you will probably upload your texts as File (PDF, MS Word or Excel). In this case you are prompted to enter the Title for the file and indicate the location of this file on your hard drive (by clicking the Browse button). The other fields on the file upload dialogue page are not compulsory (compulsory fields are marked with a red dot).
Content type Page is another most commonly used way to publish textual information: adding a Page will create a Web page which can be edited in a WYSIWYG mode (What You See Is What You Get, just like in MS Word). This allows copying the text from another document (e.g. MS Word file) and formatting the text using the buttons above the Body Text box (Bold, Italic, indexes, alignment etc).
News items and Events are more dynamic content types – both are useful tools for collaboration and planning. Published News items will be displayed in the News section and Events in Calendar.

Adding content to the public area

Public area of the portal (accessible from the left menu) can be edited only by chief editors. It is quite easy to check if you have permissions to modify the contents of the folder you are currently looking at: if you have been granted the right to add or edit content in this folder, you will see a green menu bar on the top of the document. This menu contains following tabs: Contents, View, Edit, Properties and Sharing. In addition, you will notice some pull-down menus on the right side of the same manu bar: Display, Add to folder and State.

Publishing the content

Adding a content object is only the first step – your Page or File will not be immediately visible for other users of the portal. Only these content object which have the state Published are visible to everybody. If you have sufficient permissions, you can change yourself the state of the content object into Published (from the pull-down menu in the upper right corner) . If you lack the permissions you can only Submit the object for reviewing and it will be published by one of the editors.

Additional features of content objects

You can switch on the commenting feature for each object (under Properties tab). You can also add keywords to a content object here – the other objects sharing the same keywords are listed then on the left side of the screen.