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...