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

Meet the products


The most flexible and trouble-free solution for embedding audio and video in Plone is a product called collective.flowplayer. Written by long-time Plone developer Martin Aspeli, collective.flowplayer wraps a free Flash-based media player called, more concisely, "Flowplayer" in a thin coating of Plone goodness, allowing even contributors who don't speak HTML to add media to a site. The product makes it a point-and-click operation to add MP3 audio or Flash video (FLV) to any rich text field, as found in pages, events, or news items. It also allows for audio and video in portlets and automatically provides a player interface on MP3s or FLVs uploaded using the File content type.

Note

Pros and cons of Flash video

Flash-encapsulated video has its ups and downs. One of the ups is extremely high browser penetration: some estimates place Flash on 98% of all browsers, making this format totally transparent for nearly all your audience. Both YouTube and Google Video use it, so, if...