29 December 2011, 22:56

Greetings,

I've been working on bug #901894 which requests a way to showcase popular pages.

I've pushed a potential patch for this today to gerrit ( https://reviews.mahara.org/#change,964 ) that would be good to get opinions about.

The functionality is thus:

• It adds a block for the user dashboard and is added by default to the dashboards of new users. This lets users configure the list length, whether the list should show in a random order and the pool which the list comes from (depends on if random is set). Being a blocktype, it allows for having multiple variations of list in separate blocks.
• It adds an optional block to the sidebar which is has global defaults (configurable in site admin) but is able to be overridden by logged in users. The options are the same as those for the dashboard block.
• The site admin can disable the sidebar block, and users cannot make it appear unless the admin has it enabled. These options appear in the bottom fieldset of site options.
• Users can hide the block from the sidebar.

We are interested in feedback about this functionality. Specifically about the level of configuration available.

Thanks,
Melissa. 

30 December 2011, 6:53

Hello Melissa,

I spent some time to try your new feature. It works well on my Mahara test instance.

I have one question and one request and one remark.

Question: How your script decides the popularity of a page? Is it based on my access to pages? The number of times a page is accessed by me, my group, by all the users in an instiution?

Feature request: It would be nice to give user more freedom to choose the pages they would like to see in this bloc. For example by providing a search field on keywords (a comma separated list, or a choice of existing keywords from a list)

Remark: In 1.5, you at Catalyst have decided to change the look of the icons. I am not sure they are better (in fact I think the opposite but it is only my taste) and, what is moreover important is you added text into them which makes more complicated the work of translation. If you want to relase such texted icon, I think we should decide on a way to offer alternate icons which will be loaded from the language package. But this is not the place to discuss this here and I will write a post elsewhere soon.

Cheers,

-dajan

03 January 2012, 16:06

Question: How your script decides the popularity of a page? Is it based on my access to pages? The number of times a page is accessed by me, my group, by all the users in an instiution?

Purely on the number of visits from all users that the view has had. I don't think we store the data necessary for making it be per-group or per-user or per-institution.

Feature request: It would be nice to give user more freedom to choose the pages they would like to see in this bloc. For example by providing a search field on keywords (a comma separated list, or a choice of existing keywords from a list)

To me this sounds like something that may actually be better suited as a whole other block that would also allow for users to choose that it not matter about the popularity; an aspect of a "popular pages" block I think is rather important 

Remark: In 1.5, you at Catalyst have decided to change the look of the icons. I am not sure they are better (in fact I think the opposite but it is only my taste) and, what is moreover important is you added text into them which makes more complicated the work of translation. If you want to relase such texted icon, I think we should decide on a way to offer alternate icons which will be loaded from the language package. But this is not the place to discuss this here and I will write a post elsewhere soon.

There's already a bug (and duplicate) open for this on Launchpad. We know it's an issue and since it's been targetted to the 1.5.0 milestone, which indicates we will look at it and it's been discussed here numerous times. I believe we haven't had the graphics design resource to deal with it in the past few months and iconography does take a fair bit of time. I apologise that making a quick temporary icon so we could differentiate my feature from existing ones appeared as though we were ignoring the outstanding request. However, lets not derail the discussion of this feature by focussing on the icon which was only ever going to be temporary.

Thanks for testing the feature!

Melissa

03 January 2012, 22:12

Hello Melissa,

That's a great start on this feature. Here is a brain dump from my testing (not in a prioritized list, just a numbered list for easier referencing):

1. I  don't think a default side block and a default dashboard block for all new users would be good because then the information is doubled up. Why not just make it a default block on the dashboard or just a side block?
2. I would prefer to have a "Show more" link in the sidebar (and the dashboard block) so that you can see more than the pages that the admin allows you to see at one glance. That would be similar to the "Show more" link for the online users side block.
3. I think we need to revisit the "General settings" option in the site admin area. Now everything gets put in there that doesn't have a special place. For your settings, it's not so clear that there are actually a number of items that need to be taken into consideration to set the entire block. I think a separate drop-out area would be nice.
4. Not important right now as still under development: The side block needs a bit CSS looking into as the shading doesn't extend all the way. I just wanted to write it down so that I don't forget to check it later again during another test.
5. I think it would be nice to have some more setting possibilities esp. for the dashboard block like most popular pages based on a tag, most pages with comments, a list of all pages in alphabetical order (because there is no way of seeing all that you have access to as Shared Pages only shows the ones that are shared directly with you), show popular pages from my institution(s) only (institution admin could have a setting allowing me to see also pages from entire site and then I can choose which ones I want to display, otherwise, only my institution's popular pages would be shown).
6. The comment count may also be good to display. I think the ratings aren't accumulated.
7. If the side block gets settings, it's title should be changeable.
8. The online user sideblock is now configurable for institution admins. It would be good if that was the case for popular pages as well as not all institution admins may want to have pages from the entire site displayed but maybe just the pages from their own institution.
9. The block should not appear in the admin area (the other blocks do neither).
10. The visits count doesn't update for me though I see a visits count on the individual pages. But that could be just my local install.

This will be great to showcase apges and to encourage others to look at pages.

Cheers

Kristina

23 January 2012, 6:45

how can i show my dashboard i am click on hide dashboard now i want to show my dashboard on my page so what can i do 

plz help me

23 January 2012, 10:43

Hello

If you go under your account Preferences (top right of your screen) you can hide/show your dashboard.

Cheers,

-dajan

PS : I am not sure you are in the good forum to ask such as question. So if other people will have the same one in the future they won't be able to find the answer easilly.

24 January 2012, 7:04

thnx for help

04 June 2014, 21:25