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

[Steve Lonn]

Hi Marshall,

Fred Hofstetter at University of Delaware did some client-side programming to create hierarchical, collapsable menus in his Education Sakai sites using Dreamweaver and Ajax. You can review his slides from the Virginia Tech Conference (2008) here: http://confluence.sakaiproject.org//x/MAB8Ag

There really aren't any dynamic client-scripts built into the Sakai 2.x series, but there is a strong effort to make Sakai 3 more user controlled in terms of look and feel. You can contact your local Admins at Rhode Island and they can remove the synoptic tools on your site and replace them with your own webpage like Fred's (note that this customization will reset if you add/remove tools). Some implementations of Sakai do have templates, but they are usually institution-specific. 

Hope that helps - Have a great semester, Steve

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Steven Lonn, Ph.D.  -  Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Usability, Support, and Evaluation (USE) Lab, Part of the CTools / Sakai Team
Digital Media Commons @ The Duderstadt Center, University of Michigan
Ph: (248) 905-1566	AIM: simchasl	Web: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~slonn/
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------




On Jan 25, 2010, at 8:46 AM, Marshall Feldman wrote:

> 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:
> 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.
> 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.
> 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
> _______________________________________________
> sakai-user mailing list
> sakai-user at collab.sakaiproject.org
> http://collab.sakaiproject.org/mailman/listinfo/sakai-user
> 
> TO UNSUBSCRIBE: send email to sakai-user-unsubscribe at collab.sakaiproject.org with a subject of "unsubscribe"

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://collab.sakaiproject.org/pipermail/sakai-user/attachments/20100125/e1f5a913/attachment-0001.html