For the Siyavula project we partnered with Connexions as our online content platform (some of the reasons can be found here). As part of this partnership we try to do more than use Connexions as a repository but also support the continuous development of the repository through sourcing more content and helping enhance technical offering as much as possible. There are always many potential avenues for development in any software project and we’ve been trying to help on those that make life easier for teachers in South Africa to be more effective and efficient when using the site.

One area that has been flagged by a number of people, not just our teachers at workshops, is that the authoring side of the site can be very slow at times. Some people just say that it is because the site is built on Plone but that isn’t fair so, to support our teachers, the broader Connexions community and the Connexions Consortium, I commissioned Upfront Systems to do a performance analysis of the authoring side of the site.