mahara-contributors team mailing list archive

[Aaron Wells <1208312@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

To add an implementation note here, the way "Collections" were
implemented in Mahara was sort of an after-thought, and that's the
reason why each View can only belong to a single Collection.

Basically, the problem is access control. We don't store an access
control record for the Collection itself; instead, we just sync up all
the Views in the Collection so that they have the exact same access
control settings.

I took a stab at refactoring this to keep separate access control
records for Collections (with an eye that, perhaps, we could expand
access control to other things as well, like individual Artefacts). But
the access control code is all over the place in Mahara, and there
turned out to be several weird little corner cases involving the
permissions page; and basically it wound up needing an enormous and
widespread code change to implement the relatively modest benefit of
being able to put a Page into multiple Collections. :(

So, we decided at the moment it would be more beneficial to put our
development resources into other areas.

I'd still like to do it, though, because logically it makes little sense
that a Page can belong to only one Collection. Or perhaps what we need
to do is come up with a more robust "Site" type entity for Mahara. What
Collections were supposed to be, in the first place, was a way to create
a multi-Page mini-website or book out of Mahara Pages.

I suppose also complicating things, is the fact that Collections are
about the only way to organize and collectively manage a user's Pages.
So, they sort of do double-duty as "folders" for the Page list.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1208312

Title:
  Creating page collections from tags

Status in Mahara ePortfolio:
  Triaged

Bug description:
  Mahara 1.7+

  The process of creating and managing collection of pages is somewhat
  complicated - and puts limits on real world requirements by the fact
  that pages can only be added to one collection.

  Could the collection system be extended to allow the creation of
  collections based on one or more tags?

  We can already add tags to pages so we are half way along this path.
  The ability to create a collection tagged with "Professional
  Development Activity" and "Professional Development and Review" and
  "2013" would be very powerful - especially since any other pages I
  create and tag in this way will "just appear" in that collection
  without any further action.

  The ability to re-order would be important, in fact the existing
  collection workflow could remain largely unchanged - it's just that
  there would be an alternative to individually adding pages called "Add
  pages by tag". The user may have to come back to this screen to re-
  order pages that are added over time.

  Cheers.
  Shane.

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