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

Build a browsable hierarchy with collections


Even with the earlier pruning, a large school may still have too many events to comfortably view. For example, finding the next few months' varsity football games could be tricky when they're mixed in with all the other sporting events. To make this easier, we build a tree of collections so visitors can drill level-by-level into your taxonomy, homing in on their goal. As they descend, the monthly calendar view continually pares itself down until they reach a number of events they can comfortably comb through:

To add one of these drill-down categories, follow these steps:

  1. 1. Add a collection inside the Events collection, called, for example, "Sports". Turn on Inherit Criteria so this collection becomes a paring down of the one containing it. Save.

  2. 2. To make the monthly calendar view persist while visitors drill, choose Calendar from the new collection's Sub-types menu.

  3. 3. Add a Categories criterion to the collection to narrow the selection of events...