Forum .LRN Q&A: Publishing in dotLRN

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1: Publishing in dotLRN
Posted by Michael Feldstein on 08/03/02 07:12 PM

It looks to me like there may be some nifty publishing features in dotLRN but I can't quite seem to wrap my head around how they work yet.

A few questions:

  • What is the whole "research papers" deal and how does the UI work for it?
  • If you have docs in the file-storage folders for one group, can you publish them to another group? And if so, what are the permissions for changing/updating the published doc? (i.e., can you edit the doc from the published space or do you have to go back to it's original repository to populate changes?)
  • Is it possible to publish FAQ's in the same manner?
  • Is it possible to automiatically publish certain designated documents to the default folders at the time that a group is created?

Thanks!

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2: Response to Publishing in dotLRN (response to 1)
Posted by Yonatan Feldman on 08/04/02 04:41 PM
research papers is a simple glue to allow class professor's to attach documents to the class from their personal file-storage area. it uses the attachments to provide this functionality.
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3: Response to Publishing in dotLRN (response to 1)
Posted by Michael Feldstein on 08/04/02 06:20 PM
Yon, can you describe the "attachment" functionality in a bit more detail? Is it (from a user's perspective) like creating an alias or shortcut in a desktop environment? How do default permissions work on a document that has been "attached" from somewhere else? And in what ways is the attachment functionality currently exposed to the user?
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4: Response to Publishing in dotLRN (response to 1)
Posted by Caroline Meeks on 08/04/02 10:10 PM
Attachments are currently exposed in Forums and Calendar.

If you click add an attachment you get a view of file-storage and you can either choose an existing item or add a new one.

I don't think at this point that there is any change to the permissions on the file but that may be part of research papers.

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5: Response to Publishing in dotLRN (response to 1)
Posted by Caroline Meeks on 08/04/02 10:25 PM
Static Portlets are another interesting tool for publishing information.

Currently Sloan is using static-portlets to publish a Research Links portlet (a list of useful html links from generated by library personnel) in every user's portal.

We are considering expanding the functionality of static-portlets to allow them to have more then 4000 characters and to allow them to be either sharable (the original owner continues to control the content) or copiable (the new owner can modify the content) between portals.

One of the questions you have to ask yourself is do you want each class to have a copy of these shared files that they can modify or do you want them to have a pointer to a centrally maintained file?

If you want want to centrally maintain there resources, you might want to do is create a static portlet with links to the files.

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6: Response to Publishing in dotLRN (response to 1)
Posted by Don Baccus on 08/04/02 10:33 PM
We are considering expanding the functionality of static-portlets to allow them to have more then 4000 characters
Then the static portlets aren't stored in the CR and aren't revisioned? Things like the removal of the 4000 char limit and the opportunity to store the data on the disk rather than in a BLOB comre for free with the Content Repository, not to mention the fact that our internationalization stuff for content is will likely hang on the CR ...
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7: Response to Publishing in dotLRN (response to 1)
Posted by Caroline Meeks on 08/04/02 10:59 PM
Don: Yes I agree we need to move static-portlet content to the Content Repository.

Micheal: I thought of another way to potentially achieve your goals.

DotLRN has the ability to "Copy" classes. Create a template class with the content you want all the other classes to have. Then copy that class. This will copy all the files in file storage and FAQs and I think Calendar items.

Note, Copy a community doesn't yet work on SloanSpace. I'm not sure if its working on the latest CVS of dotLRN. Its in our ticket tracker to fix it in the next few weeks.

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8: Response to Publishing in dotLRN (response to 1)
Posted by Arjun Sanyal on 08/05/02 01:51 AM
caroline: clone (aka copy) is working in current CVS
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9: Response to Publishing in dotLRN (response to 1)
Posted by Michael Feldstein on 08/05/02 02:24 AM
Interesting stuff here.

A couple of more questions:

First, where is the "copy" or "clone" feature in the UI?

Second, is it possible to upload an entire directory (i.e., a static web site) to a file-storage file folder?

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10: Response to Publishing in dotLRN (response to 1)
Posted by Arjun Sanyal on 08/05/02 02:40 AM
it's the "copy this group" link on the admin page of each community. clone is what it's called in the code.

i don't know of any "bulk upload" functions in fs, but i may be forgetting something.

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11: Response to Publishing in dotLRN (response to 1)
Posted by Michael Feldstein on 08/05/02 02:46 AM
"i don't know of any "bulk upload" functions in fs, but i may be forgetting something."

I'm not sure if bulk upload is actually the feature I'm looking for anyway, because I don't really need to access each page of the web site separately through the file-storage UI. What I really want (I think) is to associate a set of static pages with a group. (I seem to recall some functionality like this in 3.x...was it "content sections"?) I can do this manually, of course, by simply FTPing the web pages to a static directory on the server and putting a link to it from, say, a static portlet, but that's pretty clunky.