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

Pack the ZODB


The first of the periodic maintenance tasks is packing the Zope database.

Why to pack

First, a little background.

Zope's object database, ZODB, is one of its most compelling features. Automatically translating Plone's Python objects to on-disk representations, the ZODB divests developers of a whole layer of concerns they would otherwise have to spend time on: for example, setting up an object-relational mapping layer like SQLAlchemy.

Out of the box, the ZODB stores its contents in the Data.fs files you may have seen lurking in the var folders of your Zope instances. Data.fs files rarely travel alone. More often, they hang out with their friends: Data.fs.index, Data.fs.tmp, and a few others. Here's a who's-who of the Data.fs crew:

Data.fs

This is where the important data lives: all your pages, folders, images, and even your Site Setup settings. Though the head of the gang, Data.fs files are really just simple lists of transactions. ZODB transactions—which are just like transactions...