Book Image

Plone 3 for Education

Book Image

Plone 3 for Education

Overview of this book

Plone enables your faculty and staff to manage their own web sites, but some assembly is still required. How do you represent courses online? What about assignment schedules, lecture podcasts, and collaborative spaces? That's where this book comes in-it takes the burden of routine updates off your web team by harnessing the world's most advanced free content management system. This is the school web team's missing manual. Through step-by-step examples covering 11 common educational use cases, you'll learn how to take the box of parts provided by Plone, combine them with best-of-breed third-party plug-ins, and turn out a dynamic web environment that will be a joy to use for faculty, enhance staff productivity, and engage the student body. Plone is powerful but complex. Its ease of use for end users belies a wealth of under-the-hood features and third-party add-ons that are time-consuming for back-end web teams to sort through. The book guides you on proven paths through the forest of potential that you encounter during design and deployment, starting you with reasonable choices for each of 11 common education-domain use cases. Each one enumerates the value it brings to your site and guides you step-by-step through an implementation suitable for the vast majority of cases, meaning you can spend your time addressing the unique needs of your institutionñnot reinventing the wheel.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Plone 3 for Education
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface

Chapter 3. Showcasing Personnel with Faculty/Staff Directory

It is a rare school that lacks some sort of online personnel directory, whether a public-facing showcase or a private office phone list. The Faculty/Staff Directory product fills both these niches and goes far beyond, letting you…

  • Build department- or school-wide directories, collecting contact info, biographies, and more

  • Divide people into groups according to their areas of expertise, committee or departmental affiliations, or other organization-specific criteria

  • Use those divisions as access-control groups: for example, to grant all the members of a committee access to a private collaboration space

  • Write plug-in extenders to track institution-specific pieces of information or hide pieces that don't apply in your organization

Faculty/Staff Directory is practically a departmental web site in a box, but it doesn't stop there. The product is general enough to serve in non-academic settings as well. It is also not limited to people; it...