Online Portfolios for K12

December 9, 2003 11:19 PM

A K-12 school I am involved in wants to be able to publish digital portfolios of student work on the web. As to additional functionality (i.e. Commenting on work, Blogging) I'm open to proposals. Since the budget doesn't allow us to pay someone to hack apache and write code we're looking for an out of the box solution. I believe that Userland's Manila would let me do this at least in part - are there any other solutions I can be looking at?
posted by dhacker to Education (5 answers total)

People are going to think I work for the company because I think this is my third link to pMachine on AxMe. I've never used Manilla so don't know how it compares but pMachine will let you easily create blogs, users can have memberships (which can have diff levels of admin), use different templates (and create their own), and do everything through a web interface. People can comment, trackback, pingback, run mailing lists, etc. And it's cheap. (And no, I don't work for the company, but I do use their product and it's great, as is their support.)
posted by dobbs at 11:31 PM on December 9, 2003

I don't know anything about pMachine, but it has a free "try-out" offer, which is a good thing: see the very bottom of this page.
posted by taz at 1:18 AM on December 10, 2003

plone - it's free, has a simple installer, and you end up with a "content management doodah" that can be configured/managed through mouse clicks. it's also extensible, in that you can add python code (it's all based on zope). the biggest drawback is the lack of documentation, so you might be best trying it out before making a firm decision - the basics (adding text and images, users, etc) is pretty obvious clicky stuff, but programming it has quite a steep learning curve (i don't think that is important to you, however).
posted by andrew cooke at 6:29 AM on December 10, 2003

There are a huge number of content-management systems out there: http://opensourcecms.com has a pretty good (but hardly complete) roundup that you can log in as the admin and play with. Many of these include gallery modules; some that don't have third-party gallery modules available as well. My own experience is with Movable Type (which can be adapted to this use, but would require a little noodling) and Drupal (ditto, with more noodling perhaps).

And then, of course, theres "Gallery" itself. My web host lets you add Gallery to your site by clicking a button.

FWIW, I looked at plone and was deeply mystified. This may say more about me than about plone.
posted by adamrice at 11:03 AM on December 10, 2003

I found Coppermine to be pretty straightforward to install and configure. I also prefer its default interface to the basic Gallery sites I see. It supports commenting on individual images, registered user galleries, etc. It's not a CMS or blog tool, though, just a nice gallery application. I also use the aformentioned pMachine and like it a lot. Steeper learning curve IMO.
posted by cairnish at 11:45 AM on December 10, 2003