12 February 2016, 2:29

Hello,

I just wanted to ask a quick question:

Is there any Mahara theme, that gives me the option to choose, if I want to use a drop-down menu or the good old "every page next to each other" menu in my collection (the menu that shows the pages in a collection)? It seems that every new theme out there only uses the drop-down version. Or ist not possible (no longer supported) to use the old "next to each other" menu?

Many thanks and best regards,

Patrick

12 February 2016, 21:34

Hello Patrick,

We removed the tabs completely in Mahara 15.10 because when we spoke with users they didn't like them much. The page title was only seen in the tab, not all tabs were shown and when you had more than 5 or 6 pages in a collection with a normal long title, you ended up with two rows of tabs or even more and it was just clunky to use. The new collection screen provides the collection title as well as the page title clearly.

If you don't like that navigation, you can still put the navigation block into a page and use that (instead). We do not have any plans on re-introducing the tabs to navigate a collection, but you can customize your Mahara instance to support that. We have tabs implemented under Content -> Profile for example. You could take a look at that code and see if that helped you jump start your development work.

Or is there a different way that you could imagine your users would like to navigate a collection?

Cheers

Kristina

12 February 2016, 22:17

Hello Kristina,

thanks for your quick response. I will try the navigation block for now. I appreciate the tip regarding the coding!

Have a nice weekend,

Patrick

30 July 2016, 18:51

Hi,

The new drop-down navigation may help and I can see how this can be an improvement especially with mobile devices. I think it's a shame we didn't keep the tabs as an option, perhaps setting the new navigation as the default but allowing a tabbed navigation bar option in the collection title and description screen. We are just about to upgrade from 15.04 to 16.04 and although new users won't know any different and may benefit from some of these changes, existing users (e.g. on a 2-3 year programme) who have developed nice looking tabbed collections will notice a big change. Where Mahara is being used to replace a real-world paper based portfolio the tabs can help to replicate this with a virtual folder feel.

I realise my comments may be a bit late and this decision has been taken! However as this is such a big change and many users will only be facing it now during upgrade (in the Northern-hemisphere) I may not be the only person wondering about these issues. So here are my questions:

(1) Has anyone developed a third party theme with tabs? This may depend on whether Mahara still passes "collection titles into the Dwoo template as a list on their own" see https://bugs.launchpad.net/mahara/+bug/925648

(2)  Has anyone removed the labels "Collection" & "Navigate to page" indicated in the attached image? I am not sure they are necessary and seem to clutter the header. I would like an option to turn them off - or just hide them completely.

(3) Microsoft brought back the Start button - will Mahara ever bring back Tabs into core code? :)

Maybe it will just take time to get used to this change, but my experience tells me Tabs weren't all bad!

Any comments, support or suggestions welcome.

All the best

Jim

01 August 2016, 11:42

For anyone interested in customizing this, the collection navigation is encapsulated in a single template file, "collectionnav.tpl". It does indeed receive the full list of pages in the collection, with their ID, title, and URL.

Cheers,

Aaron