Proposals/Multipage Views Take 2
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Please visit Multipage Views before reading this document, it is the precursor.
Preamble
This specification differs from the previous one in a number of ways. First it is a rather more revolutionary change, and probably much more work, but it is certainly more friendly from a usability point of view.
The idea is that Views are made up of one or many pages, which are edited only inside My Views (or whatever we decide to call the section). In contrast to the previous specification, we no longer have two different sections for creating content. Pages no longer exist outside of the context of a View, and they don't have their own access controls. Blocks are moved to belong to pages rather than Views, and all current Views will need to be migrated to include a single Page with the current blocks on them.
User Interface
The Create View/Edit View screens will be very similar to how they currently function (although it is planned to rework them, this is out of scope for this specification). The Edit View screen will however change to a screen where the user can select which pages they want in their view, and launch the Page editor (which is what the current View editor will move to). This is captured in the first mockup.
This issue is still not resovled, but there are now mockups of some of the options. I think it might be best to let the user decide which option they want, and just load a different template at view time.
Ongoing implications
We're aiming in general within Mahara to rethink the way users author content. Mahara 1.2 has the ability to create files from within the view editing interface, and this is a model that we want to move towards in general for other content types. For this reason, even though being able to create Pages from within the View editing screen, and potentialy having to go somewhere else to create the content to put in them, is inconsistent, it is at least a step in the right direction.
