Organic.Edunet Community Portal Guide

Purpose

The Organic.Edunet Community Portals are an alternative interface to the Confolio application. The aim is to provide a read-only interface for external users who can take advantage of uploaded material which has been selected by the Community Portal owners.

The Community Portal Interface

Overview

The user interface consists of the following parts:

Featured content section (to the left)
Feeds section (to the right)
Metadata section (at the top)
List detail section (in the middle)

The following screenshots show the respective parts how they look like in the draft version of the AGROASIS Community Portal.

Featured Content

The featured section contains folders, links and resources which haven been chosen to be highlighted by the Community Portal owner. Here it is possible to highlight and present content which is considered to be important for the intended end users.

The featured content can be created and modified via the "Featured" folder in Confolio, see below for instructions on how to do this.

Feeds

A web feed provides frequently updated content to which users can subscribe. Confolio and the Community Portals support feeds through the Feed folder.

More information on web feeds can be found in a Wikipedia article.

Similar to the featured section, feeds (in the formats RSS and Atom) can be used in the user interface. Every feed is shown as a separate block. Here it is possible to include potentially interesting information from external web sites. E.g. news feeds from related web sites, calendar and event feeds, etc.

The feeds can be created and modified via the "Feeds" folder in Confolio, see below for instructions on how to do this.

List Section

The list section works the same way as in Confolio. Clicking on the title opens the resource, clicking in the area outside a title highlights the resource and shows the metadata. If a list item is a folder the list section enters the folder if the title is clicked.

The metadata is shown above the list section, see the next section for details on this.

Metadata

By default only the title of a resource is shown. Additional metadata (if available) can be viewed by clicking the plus-sign in the upper right corner, which makes the metadata section expand. The metadata presentation looks and works the same as in Confolio.

Default view of metadata

Expanded view of metadata

Making Content Visible in the Community Portal

Adding Featured Content

Content can be added to the left section through the "Featured" folder in Confolio. The easiest way of transferring content into this folder is by using copy/paste of resources and folders. Every folder in the Featured folder becomes a block in the Community Portal, with its contained resources as children.

Please pay attention to the following things:

The featured content has to be structured within folders. If a resource lies directly in the Featured folder (without a subfolder), this resource will not be visible. This is because the whole structure builds on blocks constructed out of folders and their content.
If a folder is copied and pasted into Featured a link to the folder is created (which means that the original folder is referenced). Changes made to the referenced folder (e.g. added or removed resources) are automatically reflected in the Featured folder.
If a resource is copied and pasted into Featured a reference is created to the copied resource; this means that if the metadata of the resource is modified at the original location (e.g. in the Top Folder), the modification also becomes visible in the Featured folder.

The functionality of Confolio described in the two points above prevents the necessity of providing redundant information, i.e. providing the same information at different spots in Confolio. Resources and folders can simply be reused.

Featured folder in Confolio

Adding Feeds

Feeds can be added to the right section through the "Feeds" folder in Confolio. Every feed in the Feeds folder becomes an own block on the right side of the Community Portal.

Feeds are added to this folder via the "Link..." creation dialog, however, some special settings have to be taken into consideration for this to make it work:

The destination of the link in the creation dialog is the URL of the feed
In addition, some extended information has to be provided by clicking the "More details" button
The checkbox "downloadable" has to be checked
Choose application/rss+xml as format

Necessary settings to create a feed

Every feed becomes a virtual folder and is clickable in Confolio. All feed items are shown as virtual resources. They cannot be modified, copied or cut.