Plone 3 for Education

Break the webmaster bottleneck by empowering instructors and staff

• Enable instructors and staff to represent courses using Plone's built-in content types--news items, collections, and events--without writing a single line of code
• Embed sound and video into your course materials, news feeds, or anywhere on your Plone site
• Written by Erik Rose--member of the Plone 4 and 5 Framework Teams
• Expert guidance on using the best plug-ins so that you can get the best out of your site right from the beginning

In Detail

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 institution--not reinventing the wheel.

What you will learn from this book

• Build common e-learning tasks in Plone: assignment schedules, course materials, online turn-in forms, and class interaction using podcasts and forums
• Build school-wide and department-wise directories collecting contact info, biographies, and more
• Take care of necessities, like customizing the look of your site, setting up a production server, and running incremental backups
• Integrate audio and video with Plone: weaving it into pages, populating portlets, and podcasting it to the world
• Harness Plone4Artists Calendar product to improve the display of event listings
• Find tips on information architecture and usability, learning from the successes and mistakes of several sites

Each chapter will guide you through solving a common education-domain use case. Most chapters stand on their own so you can use this as a reference book without having to "eat the whole elephant."

Chapter 1: Creating Courses. Represent a bare-bones course in Plone, for optional embellishment in later chapters. Post syllabi, course materials, and due dates, and distribute assignments online. Collect feedback from students throughout the semester to drive continuous improvements.

Chapter 2: Calendaring. Due dates, athletic schedules, concerts, lectures--track them all using Plone's built-in event support. Bring in the third-party Plone4Artists Calendar product to add wall-calendar-like views and support for repeating events, and explore some best-of-breed organizational schemes based on real-time filtering with collections.

Chapter 3: Showcasing Personnel with Faculty/Staff Directory. The Faculty/Staff Directory product is practically a departmental website in a box. Showcase your instructors, staff, and students; highlight their areas of expertise; and publish their biographies and contact details. Group people into committees and departments, and use those groupings for display and access control. Finally, get a sneak peek into the future of the Faculty/Staff Directory product, which I help develop.

Chapter 4: Extending Faculty/Staff Directory. Faculty/Staff Directory does a lot, but every school has some custom requirements. Toward this, the product supports an extensibility framework for adding fields to its data types. In this chapter, take this framework for a test drive. Add fields to keep track of a fax number and a list of scholarly publications. Just as you need them, you'll find plenty of sidebars explaining portions of Plone infrastructure, from Archetypes to adapters.

Chapter 5: Blogs & Forums. In a university, large class sizes limit class discussions and individual attention, while travel budgets limit the number of professional conferences where faculty can present. In this chapter, set up blogs and forums to counter both problems--giving students more class interaction and helping faculty build professional prominence. We'll find the best Plone blog products and explore practical suggestions of how to use blogs in the classroom. We'll also take the undisputedly top forum product for a spin and see how to use it to let students support each other, saving office hours and after-school help for those who need them most.

Chapter 6: Audio & Video. Some instructors worry that publishing audio or video of lectures will hurt class attendance, but higher-ed institutions who have experimented with services like iTunes U have found just the opposite. In this chapter, learn how to publish audio and video in Plone and create podcasts so students can retrieve the latest materials automatically. Also learn how to bootstrap an iTunes U presence for your school, offering your materials on the iTunes Store and tripling your traffic.

Chapter 7: Creating Forms Fast. Creating one-off forms--staff surveys, information forms for field trips, informal quizzes--doesn't have to be the webmaster's job. In this chapter, deputize your power users with PloneFormGen, a flexible form-building tool. Make self-validating forms without any coding. Configure them to email their submissions or store them in access-controlled areas of the site for easy group access.

Chapter 8: Styling Your Site. For a fast site launch, nothing beats pulling a ready-made look off the shelf and slapping your logo on it. However, if time permits, a custom look greatly increases your site's cachet. This chapter is a crash course in Plone 3 theme creation. After untangling Plone's confusing theming situation, we walk you through the development of a skeletal theme, giving you everything you need to customize any of Plone's default CSS or images. For more advanced theming, we point you to the best online and print resources.

Chapter 9: Going Live. The quality of your deployment configuration can be the difference between unusably slow and refreshingly brisk. In this chapter, set up a Plone installation that can serve hundreds of anonymous requests per second using one-size-fits-almost-all sample configurations. Configure ZEO clustering to make use of multiple processors. Turn the knobs in CacheFu to achieve the ideal balance between speed and freshness. Use the included Squid configuration to set up the industry-leading caching proxy in minutes. End with a sample Apache virtual host configuration that ties it all together.

Chapter 10: Maintenance, Backups, and Upgrades. Keep Plone running smoothly by automating database maintenance and backups. Ensure pain-free upgrades by learning how much to trust Plone's releases, and test third-party products to avoid unpleasant surprises.

Approach

This book is written especially for time-constrained web teams. Every chapter is hands-on from start to finish, focusing on getting a value-adding site up fast. Necessary theory and tips on best practices are interspersed with the step-by-step instructions, broken out into sidebars so it informs your progress without impeding it. Also, every chapter is independent, dealing with a specific use case--for example, publishing video, creating forms, or representing assignment schedules and syllabi--so you can skip straight to what you need.

Most chapters require no programming at all. The few where we dig deeper (for example, to build our own plug-in products) are replete with working code samples and explanations of what's going on. A rudimentary knowledge of the Python programming language is helpful in these but is not essential.

Who this book is written for

Plone 3 for Education is for the makers of school web sites, from primary to university, from e-learning to public-facing, from tech-savvy teachers to seasoned software developers. A user-level familiarity with Plone is the only prerequisite; everything else is baked in.