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

Customize Zope 2 elements


The majority of Plone's theming machinery is built on Zope 2 and exposed though the ZMI in a tool called portal_skins, at the root of every Plone site.

Inside portal_skins are folders known as skin layers, additional places Plone will look for things. When a theme resource is needed for example, when an image is requested from the URL http://example.com/plonesite/folder1/folder2/image.jpg Zope looks for it in the following places in a predictable order, following a scheme called acquisition:

  • First, in plonesite folder1 folder2 image.jpg, just as the address says. If it is not found here, Zope continues on...

  • In plonesite folder1 image.jpg. Zope works its way up the chain of folders (called the acquisition chain), looking for image.jpg in each.

  • In plonesite image.jpg.

  • After Zope has searched the root of the Plone site, it takes a detour. It next searches each of the skin layers in order. However, it's not the alphabetical order listed on the main tab of portal_skins...