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

Back up Plone


For the most part, a simple filesystem-level backup of your buildout folder (that it, is the one housing buildout.cfg) is all that's necessary. Your add-on products, buildout.cfg, Zope and ZEO instances, log files—all are conveniently centralized in that folder, so including it in your normal backup routine will almost completely suffice. What remains is to ensure a reliable backup of the ZODB: like many databases, it requires some special care to copy it while it is running.

Make incremental backups of the ZODB with repozo

Of course, it would be possible to shut down ZEO, copy the Data.fs to a backup medium, and then start everything back up again, but your site would be unavailable while you did it. repozo, a tool included in your buildout's bin directory, does incremental backups of Data.fs files while they're in use, avoiding downtime. It also brings the following advantages over the simple stop-everything-and-copy method:

  • Backs up only what's changed since the last backup...