I decided to drill down the categories I’m using with Furl to make them even more specific to individual areas within the departments. So now I have categories and feeds for general English, English literature, English compostion, English media, etc. Toss a few more viewRssBox macros on my links page and now I have a whole bunch of automatically added links that are separated out by content area. Now I know there are some limitations here. Obvously, these lists can get pretty long, and they’re not going to be in any real order within each category (aside from the order in which I Furled them.) And, the biggest hurdle right now is getting people to go to the links page to see the new links. It’s not like a news post where I can have Manila send an e-mail to the recipients. However, Furl does have a save and e-mail function. Hmmm…I wonder if my English Department would like to get a notice when I add a link, and then have the links page as an archive. More playing to come, obviously.
This is yet another thing that Plone can handle well with a little customization and scripting. By default in Plone you can create “Link” objects–which are just a URL and descriptions–but you’d also be able to attach a lot of metadata to them for sorting, categorization, etc and using some simple scripting to have them appear however you want.
The capabilities are there, but there is just a bit too much of a implementation and UI hurdle right now.
Glad to see you are finding Furl useful! If you want to give folks an email option, they can subscribe to your archive (and can subscribe to specific topics). That way, they will get a daily email with the new links from the day before. Click on the “Share” tab to read more about it. Also, folks can search your archive at any time (and it searches the full text of the articles/sites that you furled). Let us know if you have any questions along the way.