ZAPHOD Project

ZAPHOD - Zope Automated Processes to Help Organise Duncan

Synopsis

The academic staff in the Computer Science Department have to juggle the demands of teaching, research, and administration. In an environment that increasingly exploits internet technologies to support instant disemmination of information, data, and knowledge, staff (and students for that matter) can easily become overloaded. One way to alleviate overload is to harness technology to support a 'work smarter, not harder' ethic.

The goal of ZAPHOD [1] is to provide a web-based environment to support academic staff and to help automate some of the mundane and labour-intensive aspects of an academic's life. One of Zope's [2] strengths is its ability to interface to SQL [3] to interrogate some database(s) to retrieve relevant records and then to incorporate these records in dynamically generated web pages. So, perhaps, a good focus for the project would be to create a database that acts as a repository for class information - lecture notes, practical/tutorial records, etc., - and then automate the construction of the dynamic webpages by combining data (the content) with templates (the presentation). In this scenario ZAPHOD becomes a personal content management system (PCMS). There is scope to further develop the functionality of ZAPHOD beyond a PCMS if time allows.

ZAPHOD Project

Synopsis

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