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

Upgrade add-on products


Few open source packages can be upgraded sanely without a serious dose of buyer-beware. Plone products, as mentioned in a previous chapter, are "free as in puppies", and one of the biggest opportunities for those puppies to make a mess comes during upgrades. Here's how to protect yourself so your data stays safe and your service reliable.

Performing product upgrades should be as simple as running bin/buildout to download and install the latest versions and this often does work. However, buildout also makes a lot of assumptions that can lead to surprises:

  • A stock Plone install relies on no fewer than three separate servers being up, and they do indeed go down from time to time, often without prior notice.

  • The release of any product depends on the uncontested quality assertions of its developers and the developers — of any packages it depends on. The amount of testing done before uploading to PyPI (one major source of packages) or plone.org's Products section varies widely...