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 7. Creating Forms Fast

It's a common problem for web developers: someone needs a one-off form for an event registration, a survey, or a field trip sign-off. But putting together a robust implementation with proper validation, useful error messages, and good-looking layout can be quite a time sink. Even assuming a good form framework, it remains a programming task, drawing your development hours away from infrastructural work that supports the long-term success of your site. Wouldn't it be nice if your content contributors could build forms as needed, without waiting for or drawing on development resources? PloneFormGen gives your contributors this very independence by providing a general-purpose, through-the-web tool for building forms.

PloneFormGen is one of the best-maintained products in the Plone universe and a true community effort. Managed by Steve McMahon, a well-respected Plone developer, the project draws liberally from a long line of other successful products: its mail-sending...