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General description of the features

Features

Copied from Introduction of the Website@School Users' Guide

2. Features

Detailed information on the features can be found in the chapters that describe the various managers, the available themes and -modules. Below a general description of the Website@School features in no specific order.

2.1 Civil liberties features

• Open Standards, Open Source Software under a General Public License. Freely available for everyone.
• Website@SChool complies with the 'Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications', also known as the 'e-Privacy Directive' or the 'Cookie Law'.
• No cookies at all are placed on compuer of the visitor of a site or on orther devices.

2.2 Security features

• Focus on security, robustness and stability. Please don't believe us, check it.
• Separation of program- and data locations in the file system.
• Separation of markup- and programming language.
• Measures against cross-site scripting.
• Virus scanning on all incoming materials (provided the server has a virusscanner). Clamscan is automatically detected. Lists of permitted file extensions.
• Easy database backup.
• Extensive logging and status reproting with cut & paste for error reporting via e-mail.
• Well written, well documented, readable code.
• No frameworks

2.3 Features for blind and visually impaired

• Manageeable with braille terminal and/or screen reader.
• Manageable without a mouse.
• In sites management per user available skins for visual impairments.
• No frames and almost no javascript.

2.4 Usability features

• Richly illustrated comprehensive documentation targeted at the school users ensures a flat learning curve.
• The User's Guide is a context sensitive help function in the program.
• Mouseover texts. Short information texts or pointers to keyboard shortcuts are almost everywhere.
• Excellent developer documentation created with phpDocumentor ([*] for the tech savvy) from well documented, well formatted code.
• Unlimited number of websites [**]. If needed every group or individual can have its own website.
• An Area or Section can hold an unlimied number of identical modules, for example blogs, redirections, etc.
• Severa standard themes. Well documented, easy adaptable with Bazaar Style Style.
• Easy creation of your own theme which makes every lay-out possible.
• Sites can be split into new sites, or merged. Sectons and pages can be moved around to other sites and sections. These features enable quick changes to any new site structure or lay-out.
• Unlimited (!) number of password protected Intranets.
• Unlimited depth in sections, sub-sections, sub-sub-sections, et cetera.
• Sections and pages can be images, thus permitting navigation and use for analphabetics or young children.
• Easy installaton (also for blind users) with a well dcoumentend GUI (Graphical User Interface) and additional Users' Guide documentation. No need to install anything on a computer. Webiste@School is installed on a webserver.
• Four editors: 1. CKEditor: WYSIWYG editor, satisfies all 'Section 508' requirements and the 'WcAG 2.0 level A principles' for blind users. 2. FCKEditor: for older brosers. 3. Plain HTML editor: to learn HTML. 4. CREW (Collaborative Remote Educational Workshop): a collaborative remote interactive real-time editor. Uses Websockets, HTML5 and (unfortunately for our blind users: Javascript).
• Translate Tool: Easy translation of the program to a new languages or adaption of text strings by technically unexperienced translators.
• Demonstration data. Website@School can be installed with demo data (demo sites, users and groups) in every available language. Useful for experiments and learning to manage Website@School. Easily removable.
• Easy upgrading and maintenance with the Update Manager.
• Proxy friendly URLs (configurable), to save bandwidth. Interesting for schools having no fast connection to the Internet.
• Full UTF-8, i.e. no problems with diacritical marks as well as non-western characters.
• Breadcrumb trails with some intelligence (reduces mouseclicks).
• Fine grainded Role Based Access Control (RBAC). Each site, section or page can have its own admin(s) with permisions from 'none' to 'everything'.
• BSS (Bazaar Style Style, our educational implementation of CSS) permitting unlimited differences in styles by user editable style sheets in sites, 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.
• Alerts on 'everything' for 'everyone'.
• Groups of users with different group permissions (Unix style). This enables collaboration and project based work.

And much, much more, please see the chapters in the Table of Contents. Each chapter has it's own features.

[**] Websites on a Website@SChool CMS are called 'Areas'.
[*] Yes, we know and agree with Jacob Kaplan-Moss in chapter Viewpoints, paragraph Links we like the article Teach, Don't Tell, but... see for yourself.

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