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

A tour of PloneFormGen


PloneFormGen represents a form as a folder and fields as items within it, which lets it inherit a lot of its user interface "for free" from Plone. To start a new form, pull down the Add new menu anywhere in a Plone site, and choose Form Folder.

Note

Easing the mental mapping for users

Though it simplifies the codebase, the way forms behave like folders is not always intuitive for less technical users; some will need a bit of training and acclimation. For larger organizations, it can help to have a Form Czar or two: community-minded power users with people skills who can render informal first-tier support and training.

After you add a form folder, a page of options will appear. For now, just set the Title to Contact Us, and click Save at the bottom of the page. To give you a jumping-off point, PloneFormGen adds not just an empty form folder but enough within it to provide a simple contact form: email address, subject, and a field for comments. If this is what you want...