Its great to hear you are doing this! Here are some thoughts.
If somebody in the know could write down a list of all the places you can make
these changes and how they relate to each other, I'd be happy to translate that
into a HOWTO.
What you might do in the short run is take all the changes you made to parameters and put them into the appropriate .info files, tar them up and put them in file storage. Then the next person who wants to make an intranet can replace the standard info files with yours and save themselves some repetive work.
(although I'm still finding a few holdouts in
the breadcrumb trails that I can't figure out how to change).
At Sloan our expierience was that cookie crumbs did not really result in usefull intuitive navigation for dotLRN. We just use the portal page navigation in the header. We parameterized whether to display cookie crumbs or not so that can go back into OACS core.
I'm not quite sure what to do
about the "department" level, since we really only need two levels. For now,
I'm just calling it "host." I'd want a real dotWRK app should allow for
configurable numbers of levels, though.
We aren't using departments much in our UI either. It is a select box on the Join/Drop memberships page but all the classes are Sloan so its not that usefull. However, the Economics department IT people wandered in today to see a demo so perhaps that will change.
I'm not sure I'd call departments a "level" dotLRN can have as many levls of subgroups as you want. To me that would be the "level". Right now Departments are just a way to sort communities to make it easier for the user to find.
If the Economics Department did want to have thier classes on SloanSpace perhaps we'd use Department in the master template code to brand all of thier pages with a diferent header.
To translate that into dotWRK. Many small companies do business under a number of interelated names. For instance my brother is in construction and his general contracting firm does projects as Lancer, Marcadian Electric and 2 Rivers Plumbing. Maybe in the field its different people but in the back office its all the same 2 people.
Good luck and keep the updates coming!
