Top 5 Homeroom Changes, SP08
Site Galleries are now Collections
On many sites, the gallery lists were getting pretty long. And it wasn't clear how multi-purpose galleries could be. So we've renamed Galleries to "Collections" and we've moved them to their own tab. Collections have many uses: They can be a photo gallery, a folder of similar documents, a podcast channel with its own RSS feed, and brand new to Homeroom, they can even be "Dropboxes."
Dropboxes
A Dropbox is a special collection that allows members to submit work, but still maintain an original copy in a personal portfolio. This way, you don't need to upload multiple copies of the same artwork in order to build a complete record of your work PNCA. Just upload once to a portfolio and select an available dropbox. Also, dropboxes can be open or closed so instructors or site creators can manage due dates.
Expanded Metadata
You can't upload a scuplture to Homeroom. Nor can you upload a painting. But you CAN upload a photo of a sculpture or a scan of a painting. So give us more accurate detail about your original artwork, like the true medium, the date it was created, the dimensions and if it was an assignment or a personal project. Expanded metadata is a new way to help you build a more informative personal portfolio.
Top Items
Time was, you could only have Top Files and Top Links in a site, i.e., direct links that always appeared on your site homepage. But now almost anything in a site can be a Top Item: journal posts, collections, files and links. You can order top items any way you like, and we've even added "dividers" that you can place in between Top Items for better organization.
Invisible but Important: Lots of re-written Homeroom code
Programmer Matthew Isleb spent a great deal of time completely re-writing portions of Homeroom so that we could leverage advancements to the Ruby on Rails framework. It's hard to state just how important re-writes can be to an applicaiton. It keeps our foundation rock-solid and places us at the forefront of possibility. Please thank Matthew if you see him for being a stellar programmer willing to stay ahead of the pack.
COMING SOON: SCREENCASTS ON THESE NEW FEATURES
Also, smaller improvements are all over the place:
- You can now have BOTH a personal profile page AND a blog, instead of the blog taking precedence.
- You can now search the Public Gallery by member name and see everything uploaded by one person.
- Uploading an mp3 with a journal or blog post now adds a quicktime player for instant playback.
- You can now replace files in the files tab instead of deleting and uploading new ones.
- We've added paging to site Files and Links, so you only see 20 at a time.
- Improved seach within each site, and its now available from every page instead of a separate search tab.
- You can now select which TERM a class site belongs to, that way you don't have to include term in the title anymore.
- MFA students are now listed as such in Homeroom.
- BFA students can now select their Major in their profile.
- Bug fixes, bug fixes and bug fixes. Thanks for sending in your reports via the "Help" link .