mahara-contributors team mailing list archive

[Aaron Wells <1303551@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Nathan,

1. Probably making two calls, to get the predefined templates, and then
to get the normal site-level pages, is the way to go.

2. Yeah, probably there'll be someplace where they have a killer use-
case based all around institutions being able to customize new user
dashboards and profiles (groups are trickier, because groups don't
really have an institution...). Like, perhaps there's a school where
groups are central to how they do things, so they want students to have
a "My Groups" block on the dashboard. But then another school thinks
their students aren't very technical, so they want the dashboard to have
fewer blocks. Etc. But like I said, we can handle that in another bug.

3. In 1.9 institutions can customize the "Static pages", which includes
the welcome text shown at the top of the dashboard, so that at least
gives them another way to customize the page anyway.

4. So this ability to "lock" user profiles, this would mean that the
user can't edit their profile page? I suspect there'll be admins who'd
want to lock the dashboard page as well. In a school setting they'd
probably prefer to lock the dashboard (in order to control the student's
main interface with the site) and unlock the profile page (so students
can express themselves through their profile). I can't see much need for
locking group homepages.

4.1. Also, this should probably be a per-institution setting, which can
be overridden by a site-level setting. Keeping in mind that a user can
belong to more than one institution! So it'd be something like, if any
of the user's institutions has locked the page, you lock it.

4.2. And perhaps staff and admins should have the ability to unlock
their own pages? (And/or unlock these pages for individual users?) Via a
checkbox on their account settings page.

5. Yeah, I'm not sure what to do about the conflict between customized
pages & locked-forced-update pages. I suppose there are three
possibilities:

5.1: Convert the student's old profile into a normal Portfolio page.
Like you said, this could clutter their Portfolio (though they could
always delete them). You could limit this by only making a copy if the
student customized their profile, but it may be hard to detect if a
student has customized their profile.

5.2: Just wipe out the customized profile page.

5.3: Attempt to merge the customized page and the new template.

I guess the best way to do things would be that the admin "locks" the
profile and/or dashboard before any users are added to the Institution,
so that they never notice the change. But you do need to make it
possible to switch an Institution from a "locked" state to an "unlocked"
state. In which case... maybe have a confirmation page where you ask the
admin, hey, do you want to just wipe out people's customized pages, or
should they get a backup?

Pushing template updates also gets tricky if you have institution
templates. :) On the other hand, relatively few users belong to multiple
institutions, so I wouldn't worry about it too much.

Cheers,
Aaron

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1303551

Title:
  Allow new user default view templates to be edited

Status in Mahara ePortfolio:
  In Progress

Bug description:
  We want to allow admins to edit the default profile, dashboard and
  group 'about' pages that are generated when a new user or group is
  created.

  The patch adds a subtab item 'Templates' under 'Configure site'.
  There, admins can edit the three templates. Only layout and content
  can be edited. Changes to these templates only affect users and groups
  that are created after the changes are made.

  Version: master

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