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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.

More Info:

http://www.packtpub.com/plone-3-for-education/book

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Creative ways to build powerful and effective online courses

Motivate students from all backgrounds, generations, and learning styles
When and how to apply the different learning solutions with workarounds, providing alternative solutions
Easy-to-follow, step-by-step instructions with screenshots and examples for Moodle’s powerful features
Especially suitable for university and professional teachers

In Detail

Moodle is the world’s most popular, free open-source Learning Management System (LMS). It is vast and has lots to offer. More and more colleges, universities, and training providers are using Moodle, which has helped revolutionize e-learning with its flexible, reusable platform and components. It works best when you feel confident that the tools you have at hand will allow you to create exactly what you need.

This book brings together step-by-step, easy-to-follow instructions and learning theory to give you new tools and new power with Moodle. It will show you how to connect with your online students, and how and where they develop an enthusiastic, open, and trusting relationship with their fellow students and with you, their instructor. With this book, you’ll learn to get the best from Moodle.

This book helps you develop good, solid, dynamic courses that will last by making sure that your instructional design is robust, and that they are built around satisfying learning objectives and course outcomes. With this book, you’ll have excellent support and step-by-step guidance for putting together courses that incorporate your choice of the many features that Moodle offers. You will also find the best way to create effective assessments, and how to create them for now and in the future. The book will also introduce you to many modules, which you can use to make your course unique and create an environment where your students will get maximum benefit. In addition, you will learn how you can save time and reuse your best ideas by taking advantage of Moodle’s unique features.

What you will learn from this book

Build a learning outcome-focused approach that enables your students to perform well

Different techniques for creating a dynamic learning environment
Put all the ideas you’ve wanted to implement, but never could, into action to create unique courses with reusable elements
Motivate your students to collaborate and demonstrate what they are learning and to create projects together
Develop materials you can re-use in your future courses
Incorporate Web 2.0 features to encourage student sharing of resources
Create online workshops and galleries for your students to make presentations about what they have learned
Build e-portfolios for students to collect their work and demonstrate mastery of the units
Engage your students in team work that helps them connect course content with their experiences and prior learning
Feel confident in finding ways to accommodate your students’ learning styles and preferences to guide them to a successful outcome for the course
Develop high-quality courses that will last and stay useful and relevant to create a personal inventory you can use and re-use

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The book is a detailed reference guide, and an invaluable resource for answers to all your queries about jQuery. It is intended to be a quick reference to help at times when you need to quickly confirm a feature of the library. This book is for you if you are a web developer who wants a broad, organized view of all that jQuery library has to offer or a quick reference on their desk to refer to for particular details. Basic knowledge of HTML and CSS is required. You should be comfortable with the syntax of JavaScript,but no knowledge of jQuery is assumed. This is a reference guide, not an introductory title and if you are looking to get started with jQuery 1.3 (or JavaScript libraries in general) then you are looking for the companion title Learning jQuery 1.3.

More Info:

http://www.packtpub.com/jquery-1-4-reference-guide/book

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Build scalable and robust telephony systems using SIP

Build a VoIP Provider based on the SIP Protocol
Cater to scores of subscribers efficiently with a robust telephony system based in pure SIP
Gain a competitive edge using the most scalable VoIP technology
Learn how to avoid pitfalls using precise billing
Packed with rich practical examples and case studies on the latest OpenSIPS version 1.6

In Detail

SIP is the most important VoIP protocol and OpenSIPS is clearly the open source leader in VoIP platforms based on pure SIP. The whole telecommunication industry is changing to an IP environment, and telephony in the way we know today will disappear in less than ten years. SIP is the protocol leading this disruptive revolution and it is one of the main protocols on next-generation networks. While a VoIP provider is not the only kind of SIP infrastructure created using OpenSIPS, it is certainly one of the most difficult to implement.

This book will give you a competitive edge by helping you to create a SIP infrastructure capable of handling tens of thousands of subscribers. You can extend the examples given in this book easily to other applications such as a SIP router, load balancing, IP PBX, and Hosted PBX as well. This book is an update of the title Building Telephony Systems with OpenSER.

The book starts with the simplest configuration and evolves chapter by chapter teaching you how to add new features and modules. It will first teach you the basic concepts of SIP and SIP routing. Then, you will start applying the theory by installing OpenSIPS and creating the configuration file. You will learn about features such as authentication, PSTN connectivity, user portals, media server integration, billing, NAT traversal, and monitoring. The book uses a fictional VoIP provider to explain OpenSIPS. The idea is to have a simple but complete running VoIP provider by the end of the book.

What you will learn from this book

Identify how SIP transactions are routed including initial and sequential requests
Accelerate the processing of SIP sequential requests with the help of Loose Routing
Install OpenSIPS in a Linux platform and integrate a media server such as Asterisk
Acquire authentication and persistency by enabling a MySQL back-end for OpenSIPS
Administer the server with the help of graphical web interfaces such as OpenSIPS control panel and serMyAdmin
Connect to a PSTN gateway to send and receive calls
Enable dynamic dial plans and routing by using the DIALPLAN module DROUTING module
Traverse NAT using STUN and TURN
Bill your costumers or simply check your expenses by generating CDRs (Call Detail Records)
Monitor your SIP infrastructure to keep it running smoothly
Approach

This is a practical, hands-on book based around a fictitious case study VoIP Provider that you will build on a development server using OpenSIPS 1.6. The case study grows chapter by chapter, from installing your local development server, right up to the finished VoIP provider.

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What people are saying about Building iPhone Apps w/ HTML, CSS, and JavaScript

“The future of mobile development is clearly web technologies like CSS, HTML and JavaScript. Jonathan Stark shows you how to leverage your existing web development skills to build native iPhone applications using these technologies.”

–John Allsopp, author and founder of Web Directions

“Jonathan’s book is the most comprehensive documentation available for developing web applications for mobile Safari. Not just great tech coverage, this book is an easy read of purely fascinating mobile tidbits in a fun colloquial style. Must have for all PhoneGap developers.”

– Brian LeRoux, Nitobi Software

It’s a fact: if you know HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, you already have the tools you need to develop your own iPhone apps. With this book, you’ll learn how to use these open source web technologies to design and build apps for the iPhone and iPod Touch on the platform of your choice-without using Objective-C or Cocoa.

Device-agnostic mobile apps are the wave of the future, and this book shows you how to create one product for several platforms. You’ll find guidelines for converting your product into a native iPhone app using the free PhoneGap framework. And you’ll learn why releasing your product as a web app first helps you find, fix, and test bugs much faster than if you went straight to the App Store with a product built with Apple’s tools.

Build iPhone apps with tools you already know how to use
Learn how to make an existing website look and behave like an iPhone app
Add native-looking animations to your web app using jQTouch
Take advantage of client-side data storage with apps that run even when the iPhone is offline
Hook into advanced iPhone features — including the accelerometer, geolocation, and vibration — with JavaScript
Submit your applications to the App Store with Xcode
This book received valuable community input through O’Reilly’s Open Feedback Publishing System (OFPS). Learn more at http://labs.oreilly.com/ofps.html.

More Info:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0596805780/

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