22 February 2012, 22:01

Hi All,
In our implementation of Mahara we're working on a login system - e.g. nothing is public. However we're happy to have our staff make their profile pages public for external viewing. Is there a way to differentiate between the public and non-public profile pages to make them crawlable by a search? We're using a custom Google search and want to have the public pages searchable there.

Cheers,

Scott

23 February 2012, 1:55

Hello Scott,

If I understand you correctly, you want to be able to allow your staff members to publish pages publicly but not your students. If that is the case, you'll have to wait for Mahara 1.5. There you'll have the possibility to decide on an institution level if pages can be made public or not. You could then place your students in one institution and teachers into another.

Cheers

Kristina

23 February 2012, 3:18

Hello Kristina

In Mahara 1.4, do we have the possibility to decide on site level if pages can be made public or not ? I can't find the option but i just want to double-check

Thanks

Emilie

23 February 2012, 5:57

Yes Emilie you are right, on 1.4 you find this option in "Site options->Site settings"

Cheers,

-dajan

23 February 2012, 4:43

Hello Scott,

Kristina has right (always) and because a users can belong to multiple institutions, you teachers can also work with your students in their institution.

dajan

23 February 2012, 13:25

Hello Scott,

You wouldn't even have to put your teachers into two institutions as they are primarily there for user management as you can always see all users no matter in which institution you are.

In 1.5 there will be some features (that you cn turn on / off on the institution level) that allow admins to decide how much users from other institutions can see, e.g. of the profile page, online users in the sidebar, public pages. But in general, a student can still share his pages with any user on the site.

Cheers

Kristina

23 February 2012, 17:23

Hi all,
Thanks for the replies but I think I didn't make myself clear :) We're quite happy for staff or students to make their pages public if they choose to.

What we want to do is have our own internal search (that currently crawls over our entire intranet, not just our Mahara instance) be able to tell the difference between profiles that are publicly available and those that are not. Is there a way to determine this, even if it's on a database level? Since the URL for a profile is always just view.php?id=#### whether it's private or public, it makes it difficult at that level.

Cheers,
Scott

23 February 2012, 18:51

Hi Scott,

If a page is not public, it should have '<meta name="robots" content="noindex">' in the head element, so if your crawler's being good, those pages will be left out of the index.

23 February 2012, 20:33

Hi Richard,
Thanks! That's exactly what I was looking for.

24 February 2012, 5:04

Hi Kristina,

You wrote :

You wouldn't even have to put your teachers into two institutions as they are primarily there for user management as you can always see all users no matter in which institution you are.

This is the case if users are registered via Mahara, but if they SSO, they are automatically linked to one institution only. Or am I wrong?