Forum OpenACS Q&A: dotLRN portal behavior

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1: dotLRN portal behavior
Posted by Michael Feldstein on 05/24/02 07:04 PM
In the old ACES portals system, you could choose to make each
page one column wide by simply putting all your portlets in the
left-hand column. This made it possible to take up the entire
page width with portlets that really need the space (e.g., full
calendar). I noticed that this behavior is not present in the recent
dotLRN snapshot I'm working with.

Will that change?

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2: Response to dotLRN portal behavior (response to 1)
Posted by Arjun Sanyal on 05/24/02 09:17 PM
Michael, Currently, the new-portals system doesn't do this sort of auto-collapse/-expand of columns based on the position of the elements on the page, and I don't think it should. Users will be able to change the number of columns but _only if_ that's the action explicitly requested and only in the proper context. Why?  Otherwise an ACES-like system that allows the number of columns to change "on-the-fly" would most likely break site designs that depend on a fixed number of columns. And I want to avoid conflating these two independent things (number of cols, and element arrangement) in the UI.

I hope that explanation helped somewhat. I plan to write up an detailed architecture guide for new-portals RSN...

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3: Response to dotLRN portal behavior (response to 1)
Posted by Michael Feldstein on 05/24/02 09:51 PM
Arjun, your points make sense. What I really want to know,
though is whether/when it will be possible in dotLRN to use
some of the existing portlets in one-column pages. Full-calendar
is just to cramped to use in a two-column page.
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4: Response to dotLRN portal behavior (response to 1)
Posted by Arjun Sanyal on 05/24/02 10:45 PM
Hmm, we have "full-calendar" (and "documents") placed on 1-column pages by default. I would guess that this is an issue with your installation of dotlrn. Check out http://helice.mit.edu:8080 for the canonical example and you should update your dotlrn and (OpenACS) install to the latest CVS HEAD.
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5: Response to dotLRN portal behavior (response to 1)
Posted by Michael Feldstein on 05/26/02 05:15 AM
Aha! That helps, thanks.

In the snapshot I have, it is also only possible to create 2-column
new portal pages (AFAICT). Am I supposed to be able to choose
the number of columns when I create a new page?

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6: Response to dotLRN portal behavior (response to 1)
Posted by Arjun Sanyal on 05/27/02 10:10 PM
Yes, one should be able to choose the number of columns when creating a new page, but as you found out, currently the system just defaults to 2 columns. I'll
be fixing this after some other work.