[Using Sakai] Course designer control over Sakai home page look and feel?

[Marshall Feldman]

Hello,

Last semester was the first that my university (or I) used Sakai. Over 
the course of the semester, students complained that it was difficult to 
find things on my course sites. I understand their point. Because Sakai 
2.5 does not have any sense of hierarchical menus, the left-side tabs on 
my course sites became very cumbersome. Add to this that the default 
look and feel of of the installation merely underlines the links in the 
tabs, so that one tab is not readily distinguishable from the next, and 
you can see the problem.

This semester I am trying to remedy the problem. I would like to use CSS 
to customize the look of pages for my classes. In particular, I'd like 
to give the tabs the look of buttons, using CSS borders and background 
colors. How does one do this?

Also, to overcome the lack of hierarchical menus, I've designed a web 
page to use in the Site Info Display of a course Home Page. The page 
uses jQuery to provide an alternate menu system for the students. 
However, I've encountered several problems.

Maybe it's because the page uses a fluid web design, but it does not 
maintain its claim to screen real estate on the course Home Page. In 
particular, it has these undesirable behaviors:

   1. No matter how small I make the fonts, etc. on the original page,
      when it loads into Sakai most of them become magnified to a much
      larger size. But when I view the page outside of Sakai it looks
      fine. It's as if Sakai is overriding the page's settings.
   2. No matter how small I make the page, by expanding it, Sakai seems
      to insist on viewing it with a horizontal scroll bar. The only way
      I was able to make the entire navigation screen fit in the Site
      Info Display (SID) window was by squeezing all the page's
      legitimate information into a <div> with a width equal to 75% of
      the available page. The rightmost 25% is empty. So one no longer
      needs to use the scrollbar to read the entire content of the page,
      even though the bar is still there.
   3. The SID window itself seems to be the only horizontally fluid
      element on the page. No matter what I do, the calendar and other
      widgets on the right take up at least 50% of screen real estate.
      If I view the page on a wide monitor, they become ridiculously
      large, while my navigation page (the SID window) still has a
      horizontal scroll bar. If I view the page on a small monitor or,
      even more so, resize the overall browser window and make it more
      narrow, the SID on the Home Page gives up space to the other two
      elements and becomes ridiculously narrow. One can still see the
      navigation tabs on the left and widgets on the right, but only a
      small portion of the SID is visible. Even my trick of cramming
      content into the left side of the page no longer works.

So here are my questions:

    * How can I rectify these behaviors?
    * Is there some user-accessible CSS file that can fix them?
    * Do Sakai course sites have something like a user-accessible js
      file that loads when a course site loads and to which one can add
      some jQuery code to fix things dynamically? Where is the
      documentation?
    * Alternatively, three widgets (Recent Announcements, Calendar,
      Messages and Forum Notifications) currently appear on the right
      side of the Home Page. Is there a way to include them into a
      user-written web page instead? (I could then replace the entire
      Home Page with one in which I have control over the widgets'
      behavior.)
    * Are these behaviors built into Sakai, or are they due to the
      design of the system-wide local template?

Please note that I am an end-user professor and cannot do things like 
rebuilding Sakai, customize the overall installation, or modify 
configuration files on a Tomcat server. So please frame all answers and 
suggestions in this context.

Thanks.

     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:
fax: (401) 874-5511


        Providence:

206E Shepard Building
URI Feinstein Providence Campus
80 Washington Street
Providence, RI 02903-1819
tel. (401) 277-5218
fax: (401) 277-5464
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