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

Begin your theme


On-disk theme products can be quite verbose, so we employ a program to generate the skeleton of ours. We'll then make a few clean-ups before moving on to making a visual impact.

Install paster and ZopeSkel

To generate the empty shell of a theme, we'll use a code generation tool called paster. A set of Zope- and Plone-specific code snippets, called ZopeSkel, extends paster to provide a sort of "madlibs for Plone", churning out skeletal products whose blanks we can fill in. Here's how to get a copy of paster up and running:

  1. 1. Some installations of Plone come with paster and ZopeSkel; check the bin folder in your buildout. If paster is in there, you're done; skip to the next section. If not, read on.

  2. 2. Install easy_install, a simple Python installer, which we can use to install paster and ZopeSkel. Follow the platform-specific instructions on the easy_install download page: http://pypi.python.org/ pypi/setuptools.

  3. 3. Use easy_install to install ZopeSkel, which also automatically...