Basics | Plugins | Howtos | Applications

The courses plugin

This plugin adds functionality for managing “activities”. In Lino Voga they are called “activities”, in Lino Avanti they are called “courses”, in Lino Tera they are called “dossiers”, in Lino Welfare they are called “workshops”, in Lino Presto they are called “deployments”. But they all have certain things in common.

activity

A database object that represents the fact that a given activity leader meets more or less regularly with a given group of participants.

activity meeting

A calendar entry that happens as part of an activity.

An activity can automatically generate calendar entries (called “meetings”, “lessons”, “deployments”, whatever) according to recurrency rules. Lino helps with managing these meetings: schedule exceptions and manual date changes. It can fill the guests or participants of the meetings, and the teacher can register their presence. Activities can be grouped into activity lines (series), series into topics.

activity enrolment

The fact that a person has declared to participate in an activity.

activity participant

A person who is enrolled in an activity and usually is present at every meeting.

activity leader

The person who is usually present as leader of each meeting.

The activities of a site differ by their activity line and their activity layout.

activity line

A line –or series– of activities.

Used to group activities into a configurable list of categories.

We chose the word “line” instead of “series” because it has a plural form.

activity layout

A hard-coded way to differentiate and giving names to the major types of activities of an application.

Activities are event generators. See also Automatic calendar entries.

Pupils and teachers

While the standard lino_xl.lib.courses plugin allows any person to act as activity leader activity participant, Lino Voga (for example) introduces specific database models for teachers and pupils.

teacher

A person who can act as an activity leader.

Teachers are stored in the database using the Teacher model.

pupil

A person who can act as an activity participant.

Pupils are stored in the database using the Pupil model.

teacher type

The type of a teacher.

pupil type

The type of a pupil.