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

Start your extender


There are several competing ways to start on a new extender:

  • A free Java application called ArgoUML lets you draw out your extensions as a UML diagram, which you run through a code generator, ArchGenXML, to create your actual product. However, ArgoUML is notoriously buggy and confusing to use, and the simplicity of most extenders makes it a bad trade-off.

  • The ZopeSkel templates for the paster code generator, which we will use in the Going Live and Styling Your Site chapters, include one for making Archetypes types. Rather than taking a UML file as input, paster asks a series of questions via the command line and then lays out the skeleton of a product. It then provides a command-line interface for adding functionality. A future version of FSD will include a template for making FSD extenders using this process. At the moment, however, there remain some kinks to work out; the version in development works, but it yields a somewhat complex result that is difficult to learn...