ScoMIS Website Development » Portal Sites

Catergory Specific RSS Feed

Terry — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 08:33:16 +0000

WordPress is a very powerful Website tool, however out of the box it only exports a single RSS feed. This is useful for most websites, however for our F.A.Q. site it might be useful for schools to subscribe to a single section of the site rather than receiving a feed containing everything.

by Tips and Tricks

The Category Specific plugin extends the default WordPress RSS generator and allows custom RSS feeds based upon the category that the post/article has been posted in.

Is this something that we should add to the F.A.Q. website?

UPDATE:
It appears that WordPress natively supports Category Specific RSS feeds. Browse to the Category, then copy the URL. At the end of the URL, add a slash and the word Feed.
e.g.
http://faq.scomis.org/categories/services/remote-backup/
becomes
http://faq.scomis.org/categories/services/remote-backup/feed/
This will produce an RSS feed that is specific to the category.

Expanding Text on F.A.Q. items

Terry — Wed, 26 May 2010 12:23:11 +0000

APPROVED
Some times the F.A.Q. entries can be quite long winded and contain several different methods to resolve a problem. This can make the F.A.Q. difficult to and overwhelming to read.

To address this issue, we can introduce expanding text, where a small headline would be displayed that can be clicked. Once clicked, text behind the headline will be revealed.

Example

How to find out your IP Address
Click Start
Click Run
Type CMD
Click OK
Type IPCONFIG
Press Enter

Click Start
Click Run
Type CMD
Click OK
Type IPCONFIG
Press Enter

Do you think this sort of thing would be useful? Your comments please.

Printing from Our Site – F.A.Q.

Terry — Thu, 13 May 2010 09:53:53 +0000

During our use of our portal sites we have discovered that printing useful things out, like the information contained in the F.A.Q. portal doesn’t print on the page correctly.

The result is that the menu that is usually displayed on the page is also printed. Taking up space on the printed page and condensing the content.

A Print Preview showing what the page looks like with the menu showing.

We have discovered that other websites sites have the ability to hide menus and navigation when printing. We have now modified the F.A.Q. site so that menus are now hidden. This is will be a temporary fix whilst we work on revised templates for our portal sites.

Print Preview sample with no navigation menu.

F.A.Q. Daily Popular

Terry — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 10:46:08 +0000

When the F.A.Q. site was being developed we wanted to show users which posts were the most popular, the thought behind this was that people would get to most used content quicker by seeing the content that was being viewed.

Is this feature useful? Can it be improved?

Daily Popular List from the ScoMIS F.A.Q.

Portal Site Navigation

Terry — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 15:51:03 +0000

The original template design for the Portal sites was based upon the main DCC website. But we found it to be a fairly complicated task to copy the template exactly, so we improved upon it in some areas, but other areas were just done for speed.

One of the areas that I would like comments on, is the side bar navigation, particularly in the F.A.Q. and Training Directory portal sites. I think that the multi-level nagivation takes up quite a bit of the page and would like to try and reduce it’s foot print.

Default Full Navigation on the F.A.Q. Site

Expandable Menu on the F.A.Q. Site

What do you think?