14 August 2009, 7:34

Hello,

Due to conference, vacation, and catching up, I am a bit behind in posting our feature requests that we are funding to expand Mahara's functionality. Here is a brief one that may not even take much time. ;-)

We would like to allow learners to sort their portfolio views and also be able to put them into a subfolder. Here are further details including mock-up screenshots. If your printer turns the screenshots into a single fuzzy mass, please download the zip file that is provided.

We are very interested in your opinion on this feature request and ideas that we may have overlooked.

Have a nice weekend

Kristina

16 August 2009, 18:58

To get the ball rolling, I think these are great starts that clearly indicate what you're after 

 

I have one comment so far. I think that the My Views page almost needs to be improved further from what you suggest. The display of the Views isn't the most intuitive, I bet people are having a hard time picking which "edit" link to use for example! We have plans to change the View editor somewhat with our usability work which would make that easier. When we get to that work, it might be worth visiting the My Views at the same time 

16 August 2009, 22:08

 

Hi Kristina,

 I think the ideaof view sorting is great. I have about 40 views at the moment on Foliosapcesand I tend to wander through them looking for the one that I want. I also agreewith Nigel that the present layout leads to some confusion, particularly theEdit View Details - but I actually find students have more trouble with theblogs - they set one up and make the New Blog page the blog (i.e. enter theirpost in the description of the setup page).

Edit view access canalso be tricky if students enter multiple permissions.  Another area thatis a major issue is copy views and this would be fantastic with folders. Youcould have an admin folder, and other levels of folders. At the moment I haveprofessional views to share that are mixed with views from students (who justclicked allow copy by mistake probably). On our site it doesn't look veryprofessional but I respect the right of people to share views (that theyactually do want to be copied).

Great idea though,sorting views had not even occurred to me.

Ian Knox

 

17 August 2009, 2:41

Nigel and Ian, you are right about the problems with the many edit links on the "My Views" page. One needs to be careful which one to click though they are logically labeled. Maybe having only one edit link on the "My Views" page and then once you go to editing a view there are the other options like editing the view details / the metadata and the permissions.

The view sorting is definitely a usability issue. It would be very helpful to include it under that topic.

Great ideas regarding the admin folder, Ian. I hadn't thought about the folders from an admin perspective yet because we were just recently (last week) able to upgrade to Mahara 1.1.6 from an old 1.0 installation and thus have not worked with the copy functionality yet. Then I guess, one level of folders may not be enough as we had suggested.

Have a nice day

Kristina

17 August 2009, 18:46

Ray Merrill, Richard Mansfield and I have had a few ideas about how we can simplify the view editing process a bit, which would reduce the number of links required. That should help at least.

Certainly, some kind of organisation seems necessary here, whether it's one level of folders, more than one, or maybe something else. And good points about the view copying screen. You can search for Views by owner, but not everyone is going to know who the admin is .

It might be nice to also throw in the idea of using view tags to search views. People can tag views, though the tags aren't used for anything currently. I'm sure we could come up with a nice way to use those for searching purposes. 

19 August 2009, 6:37

"People can tag views, though the tags aren't used for anything currently. I'm sure we could come up with a nice way to use those for searching purposes."

Does that mean that the tags aren't used in the search yet? Or is it just the view tags? If it were any tags that would explain why I can't find anything when I search for them. ;-) More on that in my bug report to you, Nigel.

19 August 2009, 20:50

I don't think view tags are actually used anywhere, currently! I'll have a look at your bug report.

15 September 2009, 16:20

I can confirm that View tags are currently not included in searches.

Teachers can have access to lots of views and locating these may be difficult - displaying views by date, group, alphabetic order would be beneficial.

Iknow you are already working on the tag search interface,  the view display and view searching  should be included if it hasn't been already.

 

15 September 2009, 21:04

Richard has completed the tag work (subject to feedback from the community of course!), and it includes the View tags 

17 September 2009, 13:58

Hi Nigel and Richard,

Cool! I just looked at the tag cloud in the dev environment (had a hickup earlier tonight). It looks great and the interface is easy to use.

A couple of things that I noticed:

• In order to get to the tag "search" you need to click on a tag in the cloud. Would it be possible to make the heading "Tags" clickable because not all tags will be displayed if there are many used.
• I like that the type of artefact (blog, view, text etc.) is displayed in the result list.
  
• Would it be possible to make the row background color more distinguishable? The two shades of peach (?) are very close and the individual results are not sharply separated as the peach also softens the green. That's at least the experience I have on my laptop screen even tilting it to the best position.
• As I do not have admin access and I can't have 1.2 installed on a server right now, can the admin choose to have the tag cloud and search box turned on / of?
• I like your rendition of the functions and the interface that we discussed. It is very clear. 
• In 1.2 you often replaced the green buttons with the standard grey ones but you left others in green. Which logic is behind that decision?

Thanks!

Kristina