Whew…not only did I take a big leap today, I had to recreate the entire site. Yikes! Hopefully I won’t have to do that again. Tweaking the look is really not that hard; just have to know where to look. And the macros are pretty interesting…a lot of potential power. No doubt I want to set my kids up with departments and portfolio type links. My new quest is going to be to build the standard template. Just have to figure out what I want to have in it.
From Brian’s e-mail today, it seems much of it could be done in terms of the macros:
First, regarding your concern about getting a theme with the features that you want. I have really appreciated the customization that Manila offers. I think that you will see with the links featured below that Manila can be used for many different kinds of sites. Discussion is something that we have not wanted to spend time teaching our teachers how to use. We really want to be focused, first of all, on encouraging them to simply get content posted online. Even if I can get some to move to more of a “weblogging” method, Discussion may or may not be a part of that. Manila’s flexibility allows me to easily add or subtract that feature from any one site easily. I have removed the [Macro error: Can’t evaluate the expression because the name “discussLink” hasn’t been defined.]
macro from all of the themes that I have created. If a teacher gets interested in that feature, I will put it back in for that individual teacher. If I started getting a bunch of teachers wanting that and it became the norm, rather than the exception, I would create a theme that had that built into it and build sites using that theme instead. I’m very happy with the way that it works.
Hope so!
Good show, Will. I really like what you are doing, especially heading toward a theme for the rest of us laggards to work with. I had no problem joining or making this discussion post.
Now for a template. You’ve looked at Peter’s site. He might have some good suggestions. I would want a category for portfolios, one for journals, one for research, one for personal, one for tools, and one for assignments. That is just off the top of my head and I see you have already covered most of this already. If I have any brainwaves I will let fly.
Terry E
Looking good Will. I’m glad you’re paving the way for “the laggards” (I’ll proudly include myself in that group!). I’m trying to understand how all this works. I assume the categories that are listed on the menu to the left simply filter out posts that you’ve assigned to those categories when you created the posts. This particular function seems the same as what pMachine does in this regard. Am I understanding this correctly?
Yes, that’s correct. I’m sure that p-machine can do most of this. At some point this summer, though, (god knows when), I seem to remember a snippet from someone about the power of the Manila discussion groups being the determining factor over p-machine…maybe, Joe, you could talk about p-machine’s ability in that area.
Yep, the one big hole in what I’ll be using is the discussion feature that Manila has. pMachine isn’t nearly as comprehensive an environment as what you have here. The best I can do for now it seems is to install the discussion forum module that’s available with the pro version and do what I can. As difficult it is for me to think so far in advance, I’ll work on making pMachine work as best I can and then, hopefully, build a case for getting Manila running next year. I’ll obviously be following your efforts closely and point to your work as an example of what more can be done. I’m couning on you to bolster my case so don’t screw it up for me.