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 4. Extending Faculty/Staff Directory

While Faculty/Staff Directory (FSD) collects a great deal of information out of the box — contact and biographical information, group associations, and even rudimentary information about the courses people are teaching — almost every organization needs one or two additional nuggets of data. Experience with many FSD installations has shown that these data are usually specific to one organization — departmental budget numbers or campus IDs — things which wouldn't make sense to add to FSD itself.

However, these special requirements are unarguably important, and FSD recognizes this by providing support for extenders, Plone products that expand FSD's capabilities. In this chapter, you will learn how to write a Faculty/Staff Directory extender of your own. The Phrenology Department at the fictitious Plumsberg University will be our example; we'll add two fields to the Person type: a fax number and a list of published papers. We will then see how to...