26 September 2015, 1:05

Hi.  I am trying to use Mahara for a portfolio for an elementary school student.  My plan is to do one page for each month of the school year.  I have been having the student store his school work in the journals.  Then at the end of the month, we create the page for the month.  We have multiple journals:  Math, Science, History, Geography, People, Book Reports, Stories, etc.

I select to add a journal entry.  On the first tab is the list of journal entries in alphabetical order.  We are only in Sept., and it is already getting to be too much.  So I selected the "search" tab.

I tried to type in "Math", because the entry that I looking was stored in the "Math Journal".  There is no way to just browse, filter, or search based on the journal name.  When I tried to just type in "Math" in the search box, it said that there were no entries.  So I had to actually type in words from the exact title, "Lesson".

Suggestions:  First, let the user filter by journals.  Second, let the user sort by date (either most recent or oldest to newest).  Being able to filter by month/year would also be useful.

I have not played with tags to see if that would affect any searching, because right now we are not using tags.

Here is an example of what our page looks like:  http://beitmitzvah.org/view/view.php?t=AkP9xVSyo0YtLhTjrHw6

Melissa

27 September 2015, 21:15

Hello Melissa,

Thank you for your suggestions. Please feel free to post them as wishlist items on our tracker: https://bugs.launchpad.net/mahara/+filebug

You may find that if you use tags, you have more freedom of simply having the the journal entries assembled on the page without having to select each one individually.

Since you have Mahara 15.04, you can filter for more than one tag. Please see http://manual.mahara.org/en/15.04/blocks/journals.html#tagged-journal-entries for more information.

Cheers

Kristina

28 September 2015, 1:25

That you for your suggestion about the tags and journal entries, but the features does not work for my needs.

I tagged two journal entries with the tags "math" and "september".  I selected "tag journal entries".  I entered "math", and it could find the journal entry.  I could enter "september", and it could find the journal entry.  But when I entered "math, september" to indicate I wanted only the journal entries that had both the tag "math" and the tag "september", it could not find any journal entries.

Plus, this plugin will post ALL journal entries with that tag.  I forsee only wanting to pick and choose the best of the journal entries.  Why not just add the tag search code to the dialog box for selecting a single journal entry.

28 September 2015, 2:01

Finally figured out how to use multiple tags.  The full documentation is not very clear, and the program is not forgiving for an obvious mistake of using quotes to add tags or using a comma in the search dialog box.  

But the"display journal entries by tag" only displays journal entries as a list, not as the actual journal entry.  Plus, sometimes I want the journal entries side by side, and not up and down.  I have one journal entry for a copy of the page in the textbook, and the next journal entry for a student's work.  So I still need the ability to post single journal entry.

Yes, I know I am not using journals as one traditionally thinks of journals (blogs), but it is less confusing for my young elementary school student to think of an item as an individual component (blog entry).  Then at the end, put the pieces together as one would put together a puzzle.