I spent some time a few months ago trying to implement this feature. It turns out to be a lot more complicated in terms of implementation that it is conceptually.
What the problem boils down to is that currently collections don't have their own access control settings. Instead, we simulate this by syncing up the access controls of all the pages in a collection so that they match up. In order to have a comprehensive ability to put a single page into multiple collections, we'd either need to decouple permissions from collections (so that the pages in a collection can have separate permissions from one another; kind of like a Flickr photo "set"), or we'd have to let collections have their own permissions. Letting collections have their own permissions turns out to require a fairly comprehensive change in Mahara, with nearly every script that checks page access (which is a lot of them) needing a bit of a rewrite. "ungluing" collections so that the pages in them can have different access permissions, is a bit simpler, but turns out to have a few weird corner cases that make it very complicated. These include the "accessconfhash" column (which is how we determine the checkboxes that allow you to say "set all these pages to have the same permissions"), and group submissions. Another area of tricky corner cases has to do with Collection URL's. Currently, there is no true URL for a Collection by itself; instead, the URL for the Collection is the URL of the first page in the Collection. So, if Pages can belong to multiple Collections, you have to consider whether you'll create a separate URL for the Page-in-that-Collection, and how you'll deal with the legacy URLs to the Collection out there which now just go to the Page-by-itself, and so forth. I wound up abandoning the effort because it had the potential to cause widespread bugs in Mahara (since it was such a broad code change) for a relatively modest pay-off. Nonetheless, this would still be a good feature to include, because it makes no logical sense for it to be absent. It'll just require some careful thought and extensive testing. -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Mahara Contributors, which is subscribed to Mahara. Matching subscriptions: Subscription for all Mahara Contributors -- please ask on #mahara-dev or mahara.org forum before editing or unsubscribing it! https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1100836 Title: Add pages to multiple collections Status in Mahara ePortfolio: Triaged Bug description: Feature request. It would be useful to have the ability to add pages to multiple collections rather than having them restricted to only one collection. This would enable the same content to be used in different sets of resources without having to copy it multiple times (and update changes in several places). Case Example - 'how to' pages on using specific software might be added to several different collections depending on target audiences, such as staff / student pages, or thematic (eg offfice software) collections. Thanks, Gordon. To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/mahara/+bug/1100836/+subscriptions _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~mahara-contributors Post to : mahara-contributors@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~mahara-contributors More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
