22 February 2017, 11:55

Hello everyone,

For Mahara 17.04 we are working on combining the "Pages" and "Collections" functionality into one page, a long-requested feature. We talked about a very early version a couple of years ago, but had another look at it and updated it since taking newer UX ideas into consideration. Please see the wiki for the implementation as it stands with a few small caveats that still need to be ironed out before the release in April.

We'd like to know from you what a good menu item / title for this combined page would be.

Since the top menu item is already "Portfolio", doubling this up in a sub menu item doesn't sound ideal. Avoiding adding a "My" in front of "portfolios" would be good. It's easier on the group, institution and site levels as we could simply have "Portfolios" there.

I'd prefer not to make it "Pages and collections" as that is very long in certain languages (even already in English), e.g. in German: "Ansichten und Sammlungen".

Or should it mean changing the top navigation item from "Portfolio" into something else and have "Portfolios" for the second level navigation?

What do you think?

Cheers

Kristina

23 February 2017, 0:10

Hello Kristina,

I'm not sure these are good for native speakers of English, but how about "Briefcase", "Documents" or "Components"?

Cheers

Mits

23 February 2017, 1:26

Hi Kristina,

I can certainly understand your reluctance over this, but having thought about it, I can see advantages in using "Pages and Collections" or "Pages/Collections" as the page heading.

My main worry is, having an established lexicon of "Pages" and "Collections" that our users have come to understand and be familiar with, adding a new term to the lexicon will introduce potential for confusion unless it's immediately clear that it means "pages and collections"... and I'm struggling to see any option that does this reliably and intuitively.

I'm not sure the length of "Pages and Collections" is that serious a problem to warrant much head-scratching over it.

Cheers -- Tony

23 February 2017, 12:50

Hello Mits and Tony,

Thank you for jumping in on the discussion. I'm a bit reluctant to introduce a completely new term. There was also "presentation" and "showcase" mentioned on Twitter. New terms have a bigger learning curve and the two mentioned here have quite pre-conceived notions of what the content would contain I think.

Joining "Pages and collections" is definitely a possibility that was also floated in the office for the same reason that Tony mentioned: People already know what they mean. Maybe that's a good starting point for the initial roll-out to familiarize people with the new way of displaying them rather than also giving them a new name. We can always rename it later on if it proves that a different term might be better suited or that the top navigation item should be changed instead and then "Portfolios" could work better. ;-)

Cheers

Kristina

23 February 2017, 9:05

Hi Kristina,

 I've been thinking this over and over again and I must admit that I do not see a very good reason why I would wish to combine collections and separate pages . If there is a common subject then it might as well all go into one collection. If there is no common subject why should I add pages separately to a "Presentation, showcase, briefcase" or whatever we will call that... I'm scared that there might be confusion . The biggest problem when introducing Mahara has always been to make the users understand the difference between CONTENT and PORTFOLIO though once they got it (my fridge and my table ;-)  it's easy. But if they now get to see an additional feature I'm not sure whether this will make things easy....  and as we all realize now, it's difficult to find an appropriate name for that...

Personally I could rather see an advantage in making a collection of single views from different users available to one group or even public to showcase the work of individuals for a group. Here I could really imagine how to make use of it.. but anyway this is maybe only my personal view and someone can give me a good reason for having pages and collections in one BINDER .. oh look, there is a new word for that..

Anyway, thanks a lot for all your dedication and improvements for Mahara

sending you big hugs to Wellington and hope to see you around in Germany

Cheers , Sigi

23 February 2017, 12:21

Hello Sigi,

Thanks for your message and the tweets. We are not introducing a new feature. ;-) We are only putting pages and collections on one page so it's easier to see what portfolios people have in their account as it doesn't really matter whether a portfolio is made up of one page or multiple pages combined in a collection. They just want to see all their portfolios on a page.

We've already made the move in previous versions to displaying portfolios rather than just pages in the "Latest changes I can view" and "My portfolios" blocks. So the term "Portfolios" does make sense there, it would only be doubled up in the navigation.

I like your idea of compiling a portfolio consisting of pages of many different people. That would be a new feature unless you want to use group portfolios. At this stage, we are not looking into doing that. It's too late for Mahara 17.04 for that. ;-)

Cheers

Kristina