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. His work has focused on the foundations of social theory and epistemology, the analysis of advanced capitalistic societies and democracy, the rule of law in a critical social-evolutionary context, and contemporary politics -- particularly German politics. Habermas's theoretical system is devoted to revealing the possibility of reason, emancipation and rational-critical communication latent in modern institutions and in the human capacity to deliberate and pursue rational interests." 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 of the Art of Computer Programming 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, contributing to the development of, and systematizing formal mathematical techniques for, the rigorous analysis of the computational complexity of algorithms, and in the process popularizing asymptotic notation." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Knuth

• Célestin Freinet (1896-1966), pedagogue and educational reformer and Paolo Freire (1921-1997), Brazilian educator and influential theorist on education are our indispensable guides when thinking about a CMS for education. Almost a hundred years ago Freinet already saw the possibilities of modern technologies in the hands of pupils 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): pupils 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): pupils co-operate in the production process. - Centers of interest (complexes d'intérêt): 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 fromWikipedia)

1.2 The Website@School teams

1.2.1 Core team

• Karin Abma (ICT coordinator of the Public Primary School Rosa Boekdrukker in Amsterdam, the Netherhlands),
• Peter Fokker (Ingenierusbureau PSD, main developer, programmer),
• Dirk Schouten (former teacher, user manuals writer).

1.2.2 Translators

• Chinese: Jing Fang Liu.
• Dutch: Core team.
• English: Core team.
• Français: Jean Peyratout.
• German: David, under construction.
• Polish: Waldemar Pankiw.
• Spanish: Anouk Coumans, Margot Molier, Hannah Tulleken.
• >Turkish: Ülkü Gaga, under construction
• Your language here?: Yes! You can translate Website@School and help pupils, 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 so we can give you a swift start.

1.2.3 Code contributions

• 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 very hard to get in touch with Ger to ask his kind permission to use his code, but we received no reaction to e-mails and letters. Ger, when you read this, please contact us at info at websiteatschool dot eu.

1.2.4 Graphics

• Micky Faas ( Website@School logos).
• Greg Whitaker (some icons).

  1.2.5 Donators

  • Europees Platform voor het Onderwijs (European Platform for Education)

  1.2.6 Testers

  • J.G.M. Meijer
  • Hans Wolters

  1.2.7 Others

  • Carla Alma
  • Margret Kwantes

  1.3 Main design viewpoints

  Carla Alma and Margret Kwantes are trying to raise money. Please donate!

  1.3 Main design viewpoints

  Over the years the guiding design viewpoints have developed into the following:
  • A school CMS must be a place where pupils can learn. Learn to create and publish texts, learn management and administrative skills, experience markup languages, style sheets and maybe even learn coding. For every level, from writing the first text to writing code, a school CMS must also be a learning tool in itself.
  • 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 pupils, teachers, faculty, parents, the board, several committees and other parties can find a place to express themselves and communicate with all kinds of visitors. A school CMS should 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 differing audiences.
    
  • Most times the website of a school must be managed and maintained by many persons. All of them have little or no experience as webmaster, HTML expert or systems administator. A school is mainly managed by hard working, mostl times 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, also for eager to learn ICT whizzkids.
  • A CMS for education needs comprehensive documentation, targeted at differing audiences. An apprehensible user manual for teachers, pupils and parents, frutermore extensive developer documentation and last but not least, well documented code.
  • Last but not least, visually impaired and blind persons not only have the right to accessible websites, we also have every right to maintain and manage them.
  These viewpoints were shaped in features. Please read the next paragraph.

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  2. Features

  Detailed information on the features can be found in the chapters that describe the main functions and the modules. Below a general description of the Website@School features in no specific order.
  • OS/OSS/GPL: Open standards, open source software under a General Public License.
  • Focus on security, robustness and stability.
  • Easy installaton with a well dcoumentend GUI (Graphical User Interface) and additional Users' Guide documentation. No need to install anything on your compter. Webiste@School only uses a browser.
  • Excellent, richly illustrated comprehensive documentation targeted at the school users. Flat learning curve. The User's Guide is a context sensitive help function in the Website@School program.
  • Excellent developer documentation created with phpDocumentor.
  • Fine grainded Role Based Access Control (RBAC). Each area, section or page can have its own admin(s) with permisions from 'none' to 'everything'.
  • Unlimited number of Areas ('websites' in Website@School). If needed everyone can have their own website.
  • Unlimited number of password protected Intranets.
  • Unlimited depth in sections, subsections, subsubsections, etcetera.
  • Sections and pages be images, thus permitting navigation and use for analphabetics or young children.
  • Management with braille terminal or screen reader for blind or visually impaired users. No frames and almost no javascript.
  • BSS (Bazar Style Style) 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.
  • 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.
  • Alerts on 'everything' for 'everyone'.
  • RTFM now means Read The Fine Mouseovers. Short information texts or pointers to keyboard shortcuts are almost everywhere'.
  • Collaboration: Groups of users with different group permissions (Unix style).
  • Virus scanning on all incoming materials (provided the server has a virusscanner). Clamscan is automatically detected.
  • A Translate Tool: Easy translation of the program text strings by technically unexperienced translators. Translations are sent by e-mail.
  • Demonstration data. Website@School can be installed with demo data (a demo site and demo users) in every available language. Useful for experiments and learning to manage Website@School. Easy removable.
  • Easy database backup.
  • Easy upgrading and maintenance with the Update Manager.
  • Extensive logging and status reproting with cut & paste for error reporting.
  • Full UTF-8, i.e. ã Ê ï ó ù, ç, etcetera as well as non-western languages.
  • Breadcrumb trails with some intelligence (reduces mouseclicks).
  • Proxy Friendly URLs (configurable) to save bandwidth.
  • And much, much more, please see the chapters in the Table of Contents. Each chapter has it's own features.

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  3. Available modules

  Website@School has the following modules:
  • WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get ) editor.
  • Plain HTML editor.
  • Sitemap
  • Image album (requested by many; available soon)
  • Tv module (available soon)
  Please help us by developing more modules and write to: info at websiteatschool dot eu

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  4. Supported languages

  Website@School is available in the following languages:
  • Chinese
  • Dutch
  • English
  • French
  • Polish
  • Spanish
  • Turkish

  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.

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  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.

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  6. Useful Website@School sites

  • Main project site: http://websiteatschool.eu.
  • Berlios download site: Our download location at http://developer.berlios.de/project/showfiles.php?group_id=12201.
  • Latest manuals:
    http://wyxs.net/web/was/.English manual.
    http://wyxs.net/web/was_es/. Spanish manual (unfinished).
  • BerliOS project page: http://developer.berlios.de/projects/websiteatschool.
  • Mailing lists: New versions will be announced on http://developer.berlios.de/projects/websiteatschool. Also usable: https://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/websiteatschool-announce.
  • Support: FAQ, Email support and other quiestions, 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

    [end quote] 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. Website@School can be downloaded from BerliOS.

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  7. References

  Further reading, if you like. A lot can be found on the Internet.
  • Jürgen Habermas: The Theory of Communicative Action. Translated by Thomas McCarthy, Cambridge: Polity (published 1984–87), 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

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  8. History

  Webstie@School is the successor of Site@School, born in 2002. The history can best be summarised with [1]:
  
  intro_good_code.png

  Since we had years of experience with Site@School - which still has thousands of schools worldwide using it-, there was little need to change requirements. In that way Site@School was an excellent prototype. We only had to add long awaited features that were impossible to incorporate in good 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/.

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  8. To conclude

  Nuff said, back to work.

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  Author: Dirk Schouten <schoutdi (at) knoware (dot) nl>
  Last updated: 2011-06-02