Plone 3 for Education

Cover
Copyright
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Table of Contents
Preface
Chapter 1: Creating Courses
Prepare a place for courses
Enable large folders
Create the "Courses" folder
Create the course skeleton
Add a lesson
The value of comments
Lesson materials: one page or many?
Add an assignment to the lesson
Add course-wide events
Use news items for course-specific announcements
Add a course news portlet
Collect due dates on the course's front page
Add a syllabus
Reusing the course framework
Summary
Where to go from here
Chapter 2: Calendaring
Show events on a calendar
Meet Plone4Artists Calendar
Install Plone4Artists Calendar
Exclude trivia from the site-wide calendar
Build a browsable hierarchy with collections
Reorder subfolders the hard (but only) way
Keep keywords clean with Plone Keyword Manager
Tips for event contributors
Represent recurring events
Spotty support for showing recurrences
Summary
Chapter 3: Showcasing Personnel with Faculty/Staff Directory
Install the product
Test drive Faculty/Staff Directory
Create a directory and choose global roles
Add people
Group people
Classifications
Committees
Specialties
Departments
How grouping works: relationships, not containers
Views
Gallery view
Tabular view
A-Z view
Textual view
Which views for which types?
Integrate users and groups
Interoperating with enterprise authentication
Delegating group administration
Coming attractions
Summary
Chapter 4: Extending Faculty/Staff Directory
A look at Archetypes
Introducing schemaextender
Start your extender
Copy MobilePhoneExtender
Test your work so far
Adapters: the Anatomy of an Extender
Take this, make that
Constructor boilerplate
Add the fax and publications fields
Show the new fields in views
Hide or change existing fields
Off-the-shelf extenders
Summary
Chapter 5: Blogs and Forums
Plone's blogging potential
Add-on products: free as in puppies
News Items: blogging for the hurried or risk-averse
Structure of a news-item blog
News Item pros and cons
Scrawl: a blog with a view
Pros and cons of scrawl
QuillsEnabled: blogging bells and whistles
Pros and cons of QuillsEnabled
QuillsEnabled + Scrawl: the perfect pair
Forums with Ploneboard
Comments and conversations
Forums
Message boards
Harnessing Ploneboard's workflows
Example 1: Moderated forums as drop boxes
Example 2: Open forums for homework help
Example 3: Forums for group work collaboration
Summary
Chapter 6: Embedding Audio and Video
Meet the products
Play standalone media
Player options
Embed media in pages
Embed audio
Embed video
Embed media manually
Enable the tags
Insert the media
Media in portlets
Podcasting
Advertising on the iTunes store
iTunes U
Summary
Chapter 7: Creating Forms Fast
Install PloneFormGen
A tour of PloneFormGen
Field types
Form Actions
Emailing submissions
Saving submissions in the ZODB
Doing custom processing
Combining form actions
PloneFormGen versus Archetypes content objects
Tasty recipes
Testing
Filling out content objects
Summary
Chapter 8: Styling Your Site
An overview of Plone theming
Through-the-web versus filesystem
A load of languages
Don't let theming hold you up
Prepare your development environment
Begin your theme
Install paster and ZopeSkel
Generate an empty theme
Clean up after paster
Remove redundant package registration
Remove MANIFEST.in
Finalize installation
Customize theme elements
Customize Zope 2 elements
Changing images
Changing CSS
Changing HTML
The motivation behind TAL
Adding templates
Customize Zope 3 elements
Example: Customizing the footer
Step 1: Set up z3c.jbot
Step 2: Override templates
Further Reading
Summary
Chapter 9: Going Live
Introducing the stack
A word about platforms
ZEO and Zope
Considering buildout
Install the generator, and generate a buildout configuration
Make your first buildout tweaks
Add ZEO support to buildout.cfg
Add CacheFu to the buildout
Start it up
Increase speed with caching
Crank up CacheFu
Set up Squid
Add Apache
Generate correct links with VirtualHostMonster
A sample Apache configuration
Summary
Chapter 10: Maintenance, Backups, and Upgrades
Pack the ZODB
Why to pack
Pack manually
Pack automatically
Schedule easily with /etc/cron.weekly
Schedule manually
Back up Plone
Make incremental backups of the ZODB with repozo
Make repozo easier to use
Schedule nightly backups
Tweak your filesystem backups
What if I am a major credit card company?
Restore from backups
The smoking hole scenario
The deletion disaster
Upgrade add-on products
Upgrade Plone
Summary
Index