Office of Instructional Development

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• Office of Instructional Development
• Mike Takahashi Slobodon Jovcic

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Previous Application

• A lot of redundant data was being done for each
  course page (i.e., media links)
• The admin would have to update course pages
  manually after each lecture was made.
• Each lectures Real media files needed to be
  trimmed by appending start and/or end time tags
  to the links. http//164.67.141.398080/ramgen/m
  ath31b-2005f/math31b-20050930-v512.rm?start0004.
  50
• Updating course pages required some knowledge of
  HTML

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New Application

• New courses are created by the admin via a
  web-based form in Plone.
• No HTML knowledge is required.
• Courses can be easily queried and displayed for
  archive purposes or other future uses. For
  example, a page with all courses that Political
  Science or a particular professor has done.
• Searches can be restricted in Plone for courses
  that are restricted.
• Instead of adding and changing individual entries
  in static pages that may exist throughout the
  entire web site, this can now be done easily
  through the Administrator interface in Plone.
• Lecture dates can be automatically generated
  given a specific date range, which is set in the
  application by the Administrator.
• BruinCast data is being stored in a central
  database, which may be extended for future uses.

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What is needed to make a dynamic application
within Plone?

• There are many great products for Plone, but
  ultimately you will eventually need to create
  your own custom application to suite your needs.
• You should know the following
• TMPZ (TAL, MySQL, Python, Zope)

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TAL Template Attribute Language

• The language Zope uses to create its dynamic
  content, which is used in ZPTs (Zope Page
  Templates).
• TAL works by adding attributes to HTML tags to
  perform dynamic actions within ZPTs when they
  are rendered.

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Python

• Only basic knowledge is required to perform
  simple expressions. I.e., inserting the data into
  MySQL

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Creating understandable URLs to the end user

• Wanted the URLs to be able to make sense.
  Didnt want something like
• http//www.oid.ucla.edu/webcasts/course?id2quar
  terFallyear2006
• A function built into Zopes standard API library
  called getPhysicalPath() is used to query the
  database to retrieve a unique record based on the
  last two folders of the URL
• http//www.oid.ucla.edu/webcasts/courses/2005-2006
  /2006spring/german61a
• german61a and 2006spring
• Then using Python, we separate 2006spring into
  2006 and spring which gives us 3 values to
  make a unique query in our MySQL database.

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Restricted Courses with ISIS

• Some Professors/Lecturers wanted to restrict
  webcasts only to students who are enrolled in
  their class
• ISIS authentication was integrated with Plone to
  restrict course pages to students currently
  enrolled in that class.