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

Prepare your development environment


Before we get down the business of creating a theme, make sure you have all the tools and settings in place:

  1. 1. Run Zope in foreground mode. When developing, always launch Zope using bin/instance fg rather than bin/instance start. At the cost of a little processor power, this greatly speeds development by...

    • Puting Zope into debug mode. This means it will notice certain changes to the product we're developing without needing to be constantly restarted. In Plone 3.3 and above, this automatically turns on the CSS and JavaScript debug modes as well (explained below).

    • Printing error messages, usually hidden in the event.log file, to the terminal. Plone typically makes a lot of noise when it starts up; that can be ignored. But watch for errors, hidden among the innocuous INFO and DEBUG messages, when you exercise the functionality of your product.

  2. 2. Turn on CSS debug mode. With Plone 3.3 or above, you can skip this step, as it's implicitly done when you run...