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

About the Reviewers

Jordan Carswell has been a web developer in Higher Education for the past twelve years. He has used Plone to develop websites in a variety of contexts, from small grants to large institution-wide projects.

Steve McMahon lives in Davis, California, and works as a Plone consultant and integrator with Reid-McMahon, LLC, which specializes in working with non-profit organizations. He's currently secretary of the Plone Foundation, caretaker for PloneFormGen and is working on several new features for Plone 4.0.

Steve is one of the authors of Practical Plone, and was a technical reviewer for Plone 3 Theming.

Denys Mishunov is a Plone expert specializing in Plone themes development since early 2004. During his Plone career, he worked as a freelancer with many Plone consulting companies distributed all over the world and participated in a large number of Plone projects by providing services in design and Plone themes development. Denys is the Plone core contributor and author of some publicly available add-ons for Plone. Originally working as a freelancer in Ukraine, he has established one of the first Plone 3 projects in the world, Web Couturier, some days before the official release of Plone 3. The project doesn't exist in its original form anymore, but has provided some, previously commercial, packages as open source products for Plone Collective.

In 2008, Denys moved to Norway to work with one of the leading Plone consulting companies, Jarn (ex-Plone Solutions).

Denys was also a technical reviewer for the book Plone 3 Theming by Veda Williams.

Jeffrey G. Pittman, Ph.D., is a geologist with an interest in paleontology, sedimentology and stratigraphy, and computer applications. He has studied dinosaur fossils and footprints in the South-Central and Western United States and in Mexico, emphasizing the Cretaceous Period. He has taught geology in college for over 20 years, most recently using Linux servers, Python, and Zope/Plone for content delivery, discussion, and student work.

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