Re: [WWdevel] hiding courses from general view

[John J. <jj...@as...>]

What Davide describes sounds pretty good.  How much change was needed
for that?  Also, how does it determine the current semester?  If you
make a course for the next semester ahead of time, will that become
current, or does it look at the current date?

For our part, I don't think webwork can make a useable homepage for
ASU.  We present a single home page for courses distributed across
multiple servers.

John


>>>>> Michael Gage writes:

 > Hi,
 > Does anyone have ideas or suggestions for a way to build a Home.pm
 > module so that various options
 > for a homepage can be implemented with a minimum of programming (none
 > would be nice :-)  )

 > It seems to me that folks are going to want to be able to customize
 > their home page for a WeBWorK server much more than we allow right at
 > the moment.

 > As a start it seems to me from the comments so far that we will want
 > to break the tight link between the directory structure of the
 > courses and what is listed on the home page.

 > Take care,

 > Mike


 > On Nov 22, 2005, at 6:26 PM, Davide P. Cervone wrote:

 >>>> If you look at e.g. http://webwork.rochester.edu/webwork2 you
 >>>> will see a long list of courses most of which (in my opinion)
 >>>> should be hidden from general view.  I think in this general
 >>>> location only courses of interest to students should appear.
 >>>> Does someone have in mind a good mechanism to do this?  It could
 >>>> be as simple as having a directory "hidden" (which shouldn't
 >>>> appear on the list) and then the URL  http://
 >>>> webwork.rochester.edu/webwork2/hidden/old_course would give
 >>>> access to a hidden old course.  Or maybe there could be a
 >>>> directory "archive" (which maybe would appear on the list) which
 >>>> would need a password to enter.  Another question is whether or
 >>>> not the Course Administration course should appear in such a
 >>>> public place.
 >>> 
 >>> The simplest thing I can think of is: if a course directory
 >>> contains a file named hide_course, hide the course. I would like
 >>> to support a hierarchical courses directory at some point as well,
 >>> but that's a whole 'nother problem.
 >>> -sam
 >> 
 >> At Union, we use a naming scheme for our courses that includes the
 >> year and term (e.g., 05FA-MTH115-01 is Fall term 2005 Math 115
 >> section 01).  Our home page only shows the current term (and a
 >> custom "past courses" page shows past terms).  When the courses for
 >> the next term are creatd, they automatically show up as the current
 >> courses and the others are relegated to the past courses without my
 >> intervention.  Courses that don't match the naming scheme are not
 >> shown anywhere (they are considered to be "test" courses).  I also
 >> have special "library" courses that allow our professors to view
 >> the various libraries more easily, since we don't have all of them
 >> linked into the main courses.  The is a custom page that lists
 >> these as well.
 >> 
 >> Anyway, it seems to have worked pretty well here.
 >> 
 >> Davide
 >> 

 > "Only dead fish swim with the stream."