FacultyStaffDirectory is a personnel directory, a provider of shared workspaces for committees, a way of keeping track of people's areas of expertise, a floor wax, and a dessert topping. It integrates with Plone's users and groups infrastructure and supports an extensibility framework for custom requirements.
Works with Plone 5.0.
Older version of FacultyStaffDirectory will work with Plone 4.x, 3.x.
FacultyStaffDirectory depends on:
- Products.membrane
- Products.Relations
- Products.ATContentTypes
FacultyStaffDirectory 5.0 has been updated to work with Plone 5.0 or greater. It may work with but has not been tested with Plone 4.x.
- Add the following to buildout.cfg
[buildout]
eggs =
. . .(other eggs). . .
Products.FacultyStaffDirectory- Re-run buildout (typically 'bin/buildout').
- Restart Zope (typically 'bin/instance restart').
- Install the FacultyStaffDirectory product using the Plone Add-ons panel under Site Setup. The necessary dependencies will install themselves automatically. (Membrane remains in the 'available' column, but is in fact installed.)
To upgrade from 1.x, first upgrade to a 2.x release thusly:
Use the migration script in the Extensions folder of FacultyStaffDirectory. Follow the instructions inside migrate1dot0to2dot0.py. To perform the migration under Plone 3, you'll need the contentmigration product.
To upgrade from 2.x to 3.0 use the "Upgrade" button on the 'Add-on Products' page. (in Plone 4.0, this is called "Add-Ons").
Be sure to check the workflow and publication state of your Faculty/Staff directory. It has probably been changed to 'private'.
If your Faculty/Staff directory was using a custom workflow, it is now in a new workflow which comes with FacultyStaffDirectory 3.0. You'll need to change your custom workflow to manage the "FacultyStaffDirectory: Provides Roles" permission before you go back to it. Check out the 'fsd_directory_workflow' to see how it's done.
Because FacultyStaffDirectory 2.x is not compatible with Plone 4, you must first upgrade FacultyStaffDirectory to version 3 then upgrade Plone.
Use FacultyStaffDirectory 5.0 with Plone 5.
From the "add" dropdown menu in Plone, select "Faculty/Staff Directory". A Faculty/Staff Directory will be created as well as several default items inside:
- Faculty (a Classification)
- Staff (a Classification)
- Graduate Students (a Classification)
- Committees (a Committees Folder, which can hold only Committees)
- Specialties (a Specialties Folder, which can hold only Specialties)
Any or all of these default items may be safely deleted as needed.
FacultyStaffDirectory provides content types for creating and organizing details of people. It has principally been developed for personnel directories in educational institutions but can be repurposed for use in a variety of settings.
The core content type is Person. This has a variety of fields (email, telephone number, job title, and so on). You can also easily add your own.
Out of the box, FacultyStaffDirectory 5.0 offers Classifications that can be assigned to Person objects: Faculty, Staff and Graduate Student. If these don't work for you, you can add your own Classifications (e.g. Administrators, Technicians, Board Members, or whatever you like).
FacultyStaffDirectory also provides several content types for grouping people: Departments, Specialties and Committees. If these labels don't make sense in your organization, you can easily relabel them. In each case, the association between the Person and the grouping (e.g. the Person-Specialty relationship) can be given a description. So, for example, if Person Jane Doe is in the Artificial Intelligence Specialty, you could give the Jane Doe-Artificial Intelligence relationship a description (e.g. "Interested in the cultural impacts of machine thinkers").
FacultyStaffDirectory can be configured so people added to the directory automatically become Members of your Plone site and each person can edit his or her own page. It also adds some new roles, to facilitate management of people. For instance, the PersonnelManager role can create new Specialties and assign people to them.
Out of the box, FacultyStaffDirectory offers the following integration with Plone users and groups:
- The Faculty/Staff Directory itself acts as a group.
All Person objectscreated in the Faculty/Staff Directory are automatically considered members of this group. This group also provides the option of assigning a global role to all Persons in the Directory. This option should be handled with care. It is generally best to select only the 'Member' role, as this is the most restrictive option.
- Departments, Classifications and Committees act as groups.
Global role assignment is not available for these content types, but the groups they define may be granted local roles throughout the Plone site. For complex academic units, this can be a great time-saver, since personnel management can be tied closely to site security management.
- Person objects act as users.
The Faculty/Staff Directory configlet in Site Setup allows you to choose whether Person objects provide passwords for authentication. If you are using some other PAS plugin for authentication, such as PloneLDAP, WebServerAuth, PubcookiePAS or CAS4PAS, you will want to disable password provision so that authentication will cascade to these other systems.
- Persons own their own profiles.
Users defined by Person objects are automatically granted the Owner role locally for that object and its contents. This allows users to add to and edit their own biographies, contact information, etc. They also control sharing rights to their object and can thus allow assistants to edit content on their behalf without sharing their own passwords or user preferences.
- My Folder action.
The 'My Folder' action, found on the personal toolbar, is altered by the Faculty/Staff Directory product to take users defined by Person objects directly to them. Users defined through the standard Plone UI will be taken to the usual location (portal/Members/<userid>). Likewise, the personal preferences link found in the personal toolbar and on the plone_memberprefs_panel or dashboard will take Person users to their Person objects.
- Restrictions on group membership.
Owners are not granted the rights to add or remove their Person object from Departments, Committees, Classifications and Specialties, since these collections are used as authorization groups. Instead, this right is reserved for site managers and for the newly-created 'Personnel Manager' role, installed with the Faculty/Staff Directory product. The Personnel Manager is likewise not granted access to the ZMI or to personal preferences for Persons. This allows for fine-grained separation of management concerns.
- Configurable integration.
Membership integration for Person, Department, Classification and Committee objects is configurable. A switch to turn the function on or off is in the Faculty/Staff Directory configuration panel in Site Setup. It may be necessary to disable membership integration for Person objects in systems that have established user bases built on LDAP systems, for instance.
Several global settings, such as phone number and user ID formats, can be controlled through the Faculty/Staff Directory configuration panel within Site Setup.
Extensibility
Because every organization has a few unique requirements, FacultyStaffDirectory supports an extension mechanism based on the archetypes.schemaextender library. Using it, you can write plugin products which add fields to or otherwise modify our content types.
- Why the push for just one Directory in a site? Why not just add people to Departments?
The main thought behind this was that People could be members of multiple departments (i.e., faculty member John Smith teaches courses in both MSIS and Computer Science). So where do we put the Person object? We'd like to refrain from making two Persons if possible, and the alternative of making a Department both a container and a referenced object could be nightmarish.
- Why add membrane?
We wanted a relatively simple way to let members modify their own profiles. With membrane, we get that right out of the box since that profile is the member. We also get nifty groups like "Faculty" and "Chemistry Department" and "Some Useless Committee".
- How do I manage People across multiple Plone sites?
We wish we knew. We suspect it will have something to do with LDAP. Suggestions?
This product was originally developed and maintained by the WebLion group at Penn State University.
membrane integration by Cris Ewing.
Special thanks to Andreas Jung for his early testing and code contributions.
Plone 5 compatibility updates courtesy of the Department of Meteorology and Atmospheric Science, http://www.met.psu.edu
- Report bugs by filing tickets at https://github.com/collective/Products.FacultyStaffDirectory/issues