[Using Sakai] Home Page Components [and Templates]

[Knoop, Peter]

Hi Marshall,

As you have rightly concluded from Zhen's advice, it is aimed at those at an institution responsible for supporting Sakai's use; the system administrators, end-user support staff, instructional designers, etc.  That is the audience envisioned as handling this type of customization and configuration in Sakai.  How much of that flexibility is surfaced to you as an end-user varies from one Sakai deployment to another, depending on the set of roles and permissions an institution decides to define.

In general, however, Sakai was designed to enforce site-level "standards" at a university-wide or departmental level over how sites appear and behave overall.  (Flexibility within tools within a site is generally easily accessible to instructors though.) This approach has been the general preference expressed by most organizations.  (One indicator of the preference for "institutional standards" to-date is the outstanding feature request in Sakai 2 to enable instructors to be able to modify the layout of their home pages, which has yet to generate sufficient interest for someone to address it; for any developers following along, this is SAK-7946<http://bugs.sakaiproject.org/jira/browse/SAK-7946> and related issues, which were posted starting in 2006.)  Sakai 3 will likely make it possible for the end-user to have much more direct control over their site's layout and content - assuming an institution decides such permissions are appropriate - however, Sakai3 is still early in development and won't be able help you with this today.

So I would suggest the short answer here is to talk with your local URI support staff, those responsible for administering and supporting your Sakai instance.  They should be able to work with you to figure out what you're permitted to do in the URI instance of Sakai, and help you with and configuration changes or template creation that might help you achieve your goals.

There are definitely teachers on this list though, so hopefully you will find it a useful resource in the future in serving other "end-user" needs you might have, with best practices for teaching and learning and collaborating using Sakai.  You just happened to hit on a topic this time that most Sakai instructors aren't permitted to deal with most of the time.

-peter
Sakai Project Coordinator

From: sakai-user-bounces at collab.sakaiproject.org [mailto:sakai-user-bounces at collab.sakaiproject.org] On Behalf Of Marshall Feldman
Sent: Wednesday, June 24, 2009 2:10 PM
To: sakai-user at collab.sakaiproject.org
Subject: Re: [Using Sakai] Home Page Components [and Templates]

Zhen Qian wrote:




Date: Wed, 24 Jun 2009 11:29:41 -0400

From: Zhen Qian <zqian at umich.edu><mailto:zqian at umich.edu>

Subject: Re: [Using Sakai] Home Page Components [and Templates]

To: Marshall Feldman <marsh at uri.edu><mailto:marsh at uri.edu>

Cc: sakai-user at collab.sakaiproject.org<mailto:sakai-user at collab.sakaiproject.org>

Message-ID: <8F0AA60A-B779-4EEE-B961-1085620A1A40 at umich.edu><mailto:8F0AA60A-B779-4EEE-B961-1085620A1A40 at umich.edu>

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Marshall:



As for the "!user" and "!worksite" templates, Steve Swinsburg had a

better explanation recently: http://sakai-ftd.optimizedlearn.com/

pipermail/sakai-dev/2009-May/001313.html


Yikes! This is about building Sakai. I just want to customize the home pages for my courses.




All the templates are stored in db in OOTB Sakai. You can log in as

admin user and view the settings from the Sites tool in his

MyWorkspace site.
No I can't because I don't have admin user privileges. (Aside: This list is called "sakai-user," but just about every piece of advice I've received since I posted several questions a few days ago has assumed I'm either an administrator or a software developer. Aren't there any instructors or students on this list?) I'm just a lowly professor trying to set up his courses for the fall.



You can later copy those template for other user

type (e.g. !user.template.TYPE) or site type (!

worksite.template.TYPE) within that tool, and the results will be

saved into database, too.



By default, all course site creation would use the same template !

worksite.template.course. However, if you want more finer control of

template sites, here is one feature that just implemented, http://

jira.sakaiproject.org/jira/browse/SAK-16419. However, this feature is

not in the 2.6 build.


This looked like it had potential until I read the following: "By marking any site that you want to use as a template, via the 'Sites' admin tool, with a property called template set to true, we could make these sites available to be copied as new sites."  What about those of us without  admin privileges?  Also, looking at the images on the issue page, it seemed that the Template and Course Website options are mutually exclusive. Can an instructor use a template to customize the home page for a course?




On the other hand, you can always by pass all those default settings

in Worksite Setup tool, and customize your site creation via Web

Services calls approach...


I assume you're referring to the feature described here: http://bug.sakaiproject.org/confluence/display/WEBSVCS/How+to+use+the+Sakai+Web+Services. Besides having to program in Java (or Perl, PHP, or Python), something the average English Professor can't do, this technique also seems to require admin privileges. For instance, the page says, "I recommend you edit the jws files in the source and rebuild/deploy the webservices part of the Sakai source, rather than edit the deployed ones."

Comon. Surely you can't expect every professor who simply wants not to display the course calendar on their course home page to rebuild and redeploy Sakai!

I really do appreciate you help, but please realize I'm neither a Sakai administrator nor a Sakai developer.

    Marsh Feldman
--
Dr. Marshall Feldman, PhD
Director of Research and Academic Affairs

Center for Urban Studies and Research
The University of Rhode Island
email: marsh @ uri .edu (remove spaces)
Contact Information:
Kingston:
202 Hart House
Charles T. Schmidt Labor Research Center
The University of Rhode Island
36 Upper College Road
Kingston, RI 02881-0815
tel. (401) 874-5953:
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