22 March 2017, 15:10

I have been able to create a personal collection and apply a smart evidence matrix to it. I am trying to do the same for a collection in a Group. Is there some reason it doesn't work for groups, or am I doing it wrong?

Why would I want to do this? I use groups as a work around for the flat-file structure mahara uses to store its pages (ie, everything in one big bucket). By creating a group (with one member - me) I can separate pages that apply to a particular topic. Clunky, I know ... maybe a better way of structuring the storage of files is on the wish-list (I have  approx. 700 hundred pages and they are all jumbled up)

23 March 2017, 10:24

Hello Bernie,

That's an interesting use of groups and with that many pages not an unreasonable one. :-) What do you think would need to be done to make that better in your personal portfolio? We have pages, collections and tags to organize portfolios.

SmartEvidence isn't (yet) available in groups as it's a feature for the assessment of one person at the moment. That doesn't mean it can't be made accessible to groups. Just hasn't been implemented yet. You can file a wishlist item at https://bugs.launchpad.net/mahara/+filebug and we'll put it into the backlog, or if you'd like to make the change and propose it to Mahara or fund the change, then it'll get done faster. ;-)

Cheers

Kristina

23 March 2017, 11:38

Hi Kristina,

Thanks for the reply. I thought this would be the case as I using groups in a non standard way.

I am a school teacher and use Mahara mainly as a CMS to manage my class notes and exercises. I realise I could use tags to separate my pages, but would prefer a standard hierarchical tree structure for storing pages with the ability to create folders to organise them - much the same as Mahara's Files section can be used to stores files.

I currently (mainly) use collections as the way I  group files into topic, but with such a long list of files to scroll through, it can be a pain to select them ... hence an hierarchical structure would be nice.

I realise using an ePortfolio system as a CMS isn't actually optimal so this isn't a really big issue for me, it would just be nice.

23 March 2017, 14:51

Hello Bernie,

Thank you for the additional information.

We are revamping what pages and collections look like. If you want to have a look. Some details are implemented slightly differently to the mock-ups and the functionality will be available in Mahara 17.04. Watch out for the announcement of the release candidate latest early April if you can't download the code yourself and want to log into one of our development environments.

That revamp changes how pages and collections are displayed with a bigger focus on more recent work and also the search to find things easier rather than scrolling through long lists. It doesn't solve all use cases, but is a more modern approach.

Cheers

Kristina

23 March 2017, 15:37

That looks useful. I'm guessing the pages are grouped by Tags ? That would be a nice way of doing it as, unlike an hierarchical structure, pages could belong to multiple groups and this gives a nice visual way of viewing all pages that belong to tag. Well done!

Will certainly be upgrading to this when its available and will start to add tags to my pages (something I rarely do at the moment).

Thanks for the info.

24 March 2017, 9:54

Hello Bernie,

Great that you like it! The default view is to show the pages and collections first that you've last modified as we assume that these are the ones that have been used most lately. The sort order can be changed though and the search allows you to search for title, description and / or just tags thus changing the display and returning fewer results quickly.

Cheers

Kristina