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

Hide or change existing fields


Extenders aren't limited to just adding fields. Sometimes it can be useful to relabel, hide, or otherwise change Faculty/Staff Directory's stock fields. In those cases, we change the interface to which we're adapting. Rather than ISchemaExtender, which adds fields, we implement ISchemaModifier, which modifies them. The adapter declaration changes from this…

implements(ISchemaExtender)

…to this…

implements(ISchemaModifier)

When changing fields, be cautious. If you violate assumptions made in other code, it could result in errors. For example, changing a numerical field to a text field would be risky, but hiding an unrequired field should be safe, since, as far as dependent code is concerned, it's just as if the user left the field blank.

Note

Part of the ISchemaModifier contract actually requires implementors to take an oath before using it. Raise your right hand, and repeat the following: "I hereby do solemnly swear to refrain, under all circumstances, from using...