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

Add course-wide events


Most courses include some events that aren't associated with any specific lesson: for example, exams. We created an Exams folder earlier, and we'll now flesh it out with a collection that orders and displays its contents:

  1. 1. Add a collection to the Exams folder. Title it "Exams" so it appears consistent when used as the folder's default view.

  2. 2. On the Criteria tab, add a Location criterion, and choose Criteria type Location in site relative to the current location.

  3. 3. Leave Relative path as its default two dots. This makes the collection return everything in the Exams folder.

  4. 4. Turn Search Sub-Folders on so that, if an instructor accumulates enough exams to warrant the use of subfolders, the main Exams folder will still act as a flattened chronological listing. This saves students from having to dig through the folder hierarchy.

  5. 5. Click the first Save button on the page (not the second).

  6. 6. On the collection's View tab, choose Display Summary view to hide the unnecessary authorship information.

  7. 7. Return to the Exams folder, and use the Display menu to make your new collection the default view.

Feel free to make additional folders that hold non-lesson-specific events. In our example, you might have a folder listing local speaking engagements by prominent bloggers.

Note

Creating collections can be confusing

As you may now appreciate, the user interface for editing collections is a bit hard to follow. When delegating privileges to content contributors, you may wish to withhold the ability to create collections from all but the most proficient users. This can cut down on visitors being frustrated by collections that don't do quite what they expect.