Forum OpenACS Development: .LRN: Allowing multiple admin portal pages

The idea is that this portlet aggregates admin functions from multiple similar packages, lorsm, assessment, and eventually more. So the display of this data doens't really fit into the community admin page.

It is easy enough to add a page to the admin portal. portal::page_create tcl procedure works fine. It just does not add anything to the navigation so the admin can get to the page.

I think it makes sense to show additional admin portal pages in the sub-navigation for a dotlrn community with the other portal pages.

I'll see if I can figure this out, maybe someone else has and idea or better solution.

This quote from "Usability Evaluation of an Open Source Learning Management Platform, Jaime Sánchez & Miguel Elías, Department of Computer Science, University of Chile, Chile" (usability evaluation of .LRN) might help:

"A relevant issue detected in this evaluation is the inability of managing the information in the place and time at which the user access to it. It is uncomfortable having to access the control panel whenever a user wanted to modify something that is presented in another tab (for instance, inside of a course), because it disrupts the natural navigation expected by users and it is not intuitive."

We should be building the administration features into the portlet itself. I mentioned to you offline that we could even introduce a "admin" button that (like the i18n package) exposes administration features where they are needed (to prevent the admin view of .LRN from getting cluttered). E.g. if you want to admin a learning module, turn on the admin view and click the admin button right next to the learning module (the last time I looked this was the method employed by Moodle with a little "eyeball" button -- we can do better than an eyeball). Another simpler option would be to have an admin button in the top of the portlet.

Since I am doing on work on your site, I think go ahead and look :)

I got the link added to the subnavbar. I understand the idea of having the admin link to the associated admin portlet inside the community portlet that goes with it. To do that I needed a 1-page standalone admin portlet. That was an easy fix.

Optionally adding an admin portlet to the navbar was also a pretty easy fix and can be set on or off. The only thing we can't do, is allow a user to edit the layout of the admin portal.

Thanks for the feedback.

We stuck with admin links in the main community portlet.
The other thing we might do is mount the portlet and link to a full page under that for the admin. This way the URL shows up in the context bar and it should make more sense what is going on.