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Features / Usability

Features / Usability


Re: Two sites (sort of) using the one tiki?

posts: 63 United Kingdom

WARNING: MONSTER POST

Have you considered using group homepages?


Stay with me on this one. It's a long post but I think it hits on all the things you want. There is a summary at the bottom.

1.8.2 includes this feature which will redirect users to a wiki home page you specify on a PER-GROUP basis, that way all students and techers will see the same stuff until they login, then students, when logging in will get redirected to - for example - a page including "Don't forget your homework!!" or something equally evil, while teachers are forwarded to - example - a teachers list of things to worry about in the near future. Get the idea? If tiki can be made to differentiate between the groups, I think group-homepages should allow you to modify the page they start by seeing.

Then you can use the PluginModule to embed the relevant modules to that page. Viola, groups go to different home pages with different modules in 'em. Not exactly right I know, but you can then (if you were so inclined) drop the group-specific modules from the left and right cols adn just have default stuff like navigation and search in there etc.

You could go a step further and add groups for specific year-groups of students so that the later year groups get different homepages to the newer students. So you can include "Welcome to the school website new students" articles and orientation information on the starting year page and "upcoming events for X year" on the later years homepages.

The only problem with this is that each user needs their default group set to be the relevant group manually for group-hompages to work. Otherwise I think they are treated wrongly on accasion, which would be a pain with several hundred users.

Although you could make this play in your favour by assigning the teachers group with a custom homepage and use the regular registered group for students. In that way you don't have to go and assign hundreds (making assumptions about the number of students, I know) of users one by one with specific groups, but the teachers can be manually assigned to the teachers group giving a different homepage.
(Registered but non-"default gruoped" users will default to the homepage specified in admin > general)

Alternatively you could modify the registration system to make registered users default groups "registered" - you'd still have to manually specify teachers.
Then again - if you're authenticating outside of tiki (Did I understand that right?) then you may need to modify the "add users if not in tiki" logic to set the default group instead.

You could also modify the group-homepage system to accept full URL's instead of wiki page names and use HTML pages for group homepages with extra stuff and Custom Home for the default with school information in the form of articles / RSS modules etc. Maybe I'll add that to my list of "things I wanna mod" myself.

okay, I know I never put things in an easy-to-follow way so here's the simplified breakdown:

  1. Students authenticate as registered users of tiki,
  2. Teachers have a custom group with a group home-(wiki)-page set to something other than the default,
  3. Teahers must be manually assigned the techers group AND have it set as their default group,
  4. The teachers group home wiki page can be secured from students using per-object permissions I think,
  5. Modules can be embedded into the teachers group home page as suggested already,
  6. Modules in the left / right cols can be set to disply for teachers but not students.


Note if you don't include the students (registered) group in the techers group when creating it (include the permissions but not the group), turn off show modules to all users always, you should be able to to get exclusive per-group modules shouldn't you?

yes, no, Maybe?
RW

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