Knotes is now available in a new milestone: version 0.85

See our Knotes download page for download files and other links. There are quite a few new or improved features in this release.

We will be writing up the new features - and producing an outline of our roadmap for Knotes - as soon as we get a chance (sorry, we've been working very hard on paid-for project deadlines, which makes knotes-documentation-time hard to come by).

Please subscribe to the RSS from KNotations if you want to track developments and follow documentation notes.

In order to help those who are thinking of using KNotes as a product, we have made a sandbox site in which you can get used to managing and using KNotes: knotes.net/sandbox. The site is just a stub for playing in now; we'll try to refine it in April 2006 now that we've more or less finished core work on knotes.. Also note that the most stable bug free version of KNotes can be downloaded from http://knotes.sourceforge.net. This is a nightly built tarball. Steve will upload the other dependencies here as well. Please contact us if you encounter issues installing or administering knotes.

Also, please note that this content is still being written. Please bear with us as we complete the product and its documentation.
Watch our KNotations weblog or subscribe to the KNotations RSS feed for ongoing progress reports.

knotes provides thorough implementations for two important kinds of user activity which have been weaknesses of Plone, which we call 'discussability' and 'blogability'. A beta version is now available the GPL open-source license. KnowNet has been using knotes in several of our community portals for over a year now, and is actively completing features and shaking out bugs in response to real end-users' experiences.

To download knotes, or read release notes and installation documentation, go to:

• The most stable bug free version of KNotes can be downloaded from http://knotes.sourceforge.net. This is a nightly built tarball.
• our knotes downloads area, or
• the knotes sourceforge pages

Threaded Discussion System

The threaded discussion system in knotes - forum view - provides a fast, transparent and effective implementation of the kind of generic bulletin boards and forums at which php/sql-based solutions have excelled. It accomplishes this by using the same kind of SQL techniques for rendering its data; knotes requires a relational database alongside Zope. In some ways, knotes is even faster than the popular bulletin boards. Knotes' forum view is an option for quickly browsing all knotes content in a terse rowset formart, and the default view for level-2 or greater replies. Forum view leverages the power of clientside javascript very thoroughly, providing an extremely responsive and transparent interface without sacrificing accessibility for those without javascript. [ NB we have deprecated the use of KNFastFolders with KNotes content as of March 2006. ]

But knotes can be much more than a bulletin board system, thanks to Zope, Plone and the simple and flexible way in which knotes discussions can be invoked in a portal context. We have built it from the ground up to be:

• tightly integrated into site content,
• flexible enough to experiment with, for instance wrapping in workflow or process aware contexts to employ discussion for
  • goal-directed collaborations
  • process-constrained discussions
  • resource-developing exercises
  • team-based project management
  • e-learning, mentoring, etc...

knotes' discussion system also thoroughly implements the light-weight standards that have made weblogging so link-rich: trackback and RSS. This introduces some very interesting possibilities for non-hierarchical branching; discussants can 'reply' to a thread by tracking back to it from a different thread, or a weblog entry, or a newly-spawned topic.

We hope to make knotes for discussion a best-of-breed solution for straightforward discussion forums, but even more so will be spending development effort and imagination towards new motifs for more structured and purposeful collaboration.

Web-Logs

The web-log publishing/management system in knotes is a complete and thorough implementation of weblog, including:

• Full support for trackback
• Full implementations of the weblog APIs for remotely managing weblogs and entries, including embedded multimedia content or file attachments, trackback pings from embedded links, summary and extended content, workflow-control and API auto-discovery using RSD
• Effective and efficient calendar/archive and category navigation
• Nice URLs so the urls are predictable and human-readable, for example
  • ...Members/mmalloch/blog/weblog.archives/2004/11/23 , or
  • ...Members/mmalloch/blog/weblog.categories/blogging/api/clients/osx
• Clean, css-based, Movable-Type (2) compatible markup, with alternative MT2 stylesheets
• User-managable blogroll etc links, through Plone
• Great integration with knotes' discussion system for portal discussion based on blog entries
• Completely integrated into site content
• Easily configured for shared or group blogging, by leveraging the Zope/Plone acquirable role-based permissions system
• Easily customised for special features and contexts
• Efficent rendering of html and rss item listings, using SQL
• Clean, terse, macro-based rendering. Easily skinnable by Plone site managers (user skinnability to come)
• Embedable - a few lines of python is all that is needed to adapt any Plone product or portal type to include embedded weblogs
• NEW! Take over Plone's Add-a-Comment feature with shared weblogs - see this how-to from the knotations weblog

Trackback

When installed in a Plone site, knotes makes all content in the site 'trackback aware'. This means that members can comment on site content in their weblogs, or in knotes-powered discussions, and the content they link to will be able to show the backlinks. This applies across platforms and systems. Trackback's two-way linking allows the content in your site to seem more a part of the wider web, and lets your users interact actively with content and discussion across multiple sites. It also allows site-managers to use knotes shared weblogs to handle the Add-a-Comment feature in Plone pages (see this how-to)

Naturally collaborative weblogging

There has been a lot of speculation about the educational uses of weblogging among e-learning theorists and technology writers, but so far it has proved difficult to make really effective use of weblogs for learning purposes. A large part of the problem is that weblogging evolved as a single-author medium and platform, and it is awkward to retro-fit blog-publishing platforms or blogging culture to multi-user contexts - in particular contexts in while roles can get complicated, and in which there has to be more than just weblogging going on - for instance resource-collection or report-writing. The commercial weblogging products are not suited to educators' requirements for naturally collaborative interfaces and for flexible adapting to particular contexts. On the other hand, writing a bespoke weblog-publishing system for particular contexts is very hard, and such solutions tend to be incomplete and/or brittle.

We designed and developed knotes from the ground up to be suited for participation by many users, with possibly complicated and varying roles, and for adapting easily to special contexts. Together with Zope and Plone, it is a great platform with which educators, community site builders and others can make use of weblogging to support community activities. It is also a natural framework in which small projects can adapt and refine the ideas and behaviours of weblogging for special cases and contexts, without a lot of complex programming.

Among the special features and behaviours of knotes weblogs are:

• Very easy to set up shared weblogging, leveraging Zope and Plone's local roles and permissions machinery
• Can handle comments on your site content with shared weblogging and trackback, opening commentary across sites
• Moderation form for fine-grained control of discussion permissions
• View and navigate posts by author
• Soon to come: support for contributor non-managers to make use of the weblog API external editing clients
• Easy to customise by site managers wanting to add special collaboration features
• Clean architecture for developers to create new collaboration components or tools which leverage weblogging ease-of-use

Why Plone?

Plone is a powerful and easy to set-up content management platform based on python, Zope and the Content-Management Framework (CMF). It is attracting a large number of installations because it fills a niche: project promoters, educators and others who want to be able to set up attractive and dynamic sites easily. Plone is also receiving a lot of attention for more 'heavy-weight' sites and portals because of the powerful and flexible customisation it allows.

KnowNet decided on Zope and Plone as the targets of its own open-source development work because of that power, and because of the deep object-orientation and component-encapsulation of the CMF, which makes it much easier to produce and maintain large-scale components and deep customisations.

One great weakness in Plone to date has been its lack of an industry-standard discussion system, or an integrated weblog publishing system. By addressing these gaps, we feel that we have made Plone into the kind of system we want to use for our own project work, and hope that the same will be true for others.

Among the many strengths of Zope and Plone are powerful and very flexible/configurable systems which provide premissions contexts, etc. By basing knotes on Zope and Plone, issues like shared blogging, moderation policies, embedding in workflow or time-dependent processes, or spawning new types of site-content become easy to address.

SQL for speed, Zope for power

knotes uses a relational database and SQL for all of its data access during render-time. Zope makes it easy to bridge to a relational database of your choice; we use PostGreSQL. Using SQL for rendertime data fetching makes it

• much faster than CMF object iteration
• much easier to write the code - and much faster to execute - for fetching rowsets meeting mutliple constraints of the sort frequently encountered in weblogs and discussion systems; for instance retrieving posts anywhere 'underneath' a level in the site-content hierarchy by category / author
• much more transparent and accessible to widely available SQL programming skillsets

On the other hand, all the data in the system is also reflected in real Zope ZODB objects. This makes it

• much easier to design and implement acquirable role-based permissions
• much easier to expose to customisations and other specialisations
• easily and deeply integrable with site content
• sitewise-managable with copy/paste, import/export etc

Thanks

The development of knotes has been partly funded by the European Union programme 'Promotion of innovation and encouragement of SME participation' through our partnership in the e-compete project .

The development of knotes was also supported in part by the University of Warwick through KnowNet's involvement as portal-developer for the National Guidance Research Forum . We would like to particularly thank Alan Brown, Jenny Bimrose, Sally-Anne Barnes and Lucy Marris for very useful feedback and ideas, and DfES for funding the NGRF portal development.

knotes was designed and implemented by Mike Malloch and Steve Tufail. Many thanks for all the very long, very hard hours of first-rate grinding! Many thanks as well to all our colleagues and collaborators over the years who have (vociferously :o) expressed such good instincts and insights into collaboration on the web.