CAGD is the online portfolio tool developed by the School of Art, Architecture and Design at Leeds Beckett University. It is currently in private Beta, and will be opened Summer 2012.
Recent updates
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Folder view layout
There are two things that are bugging me about the way that folders work. One is that the page is incredibly slow -- mainly because clicking on any item or folder takes you to a new page, and the whole thing has to load again. This is something that I can fix rather elegantly, the same way as the Announcements page works, but I'll come to that at a later date.
The second thing is the way all the little icons work. I'm growing increasingly aware that having a billion ti2012.06.21
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Group Colours
Up until this week, only academic course groups have had the ability to have little coloured dots next to them, to signify which set of people an announcement or event is for, and to identify which role someone has (by the little dot after their name).
I've introduced a new admin feature to all groups this weekend, that will let every group set up by anyone choose a coloured dot. It's in the Groups -> Admin Options -> Colours menu -- you can either choose from on2012.04.22
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The Development of the Feedback Journals
The development of our journaling system is an interesting story of user-led enhancement. It started out early on in the history of the CAGD site, as a simple system designed to deliver summative and formative feedback in a private way to students. The idea, essentially, was that the student could log into the site, and go to a page that was visible to her and her tutors only, on which would be a series of pieces of feedback -- some with marks, some without.
It's wo2012.03.22
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Links to Original Images
You know that thing where you have a good idea, and then you go to implement it, and find out you already implemented it months ago but forgot to document it?
I was thinking earlier about where someone might store image files for use as graphics on a published folder (like a logo on a website) and I decided that maybe the Site should store original images as they were uploaded, rather than the 1024x1024 '_o' size that it currently does, with maybe the caveat that very2012.03.03
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New feature: Folders within Folders
I've noticed a lot of people have been using the 'folders' feature of the site recently -- the little categories on the You page that you can create and drag things into. Something though that I've been asked a lot this year is whether it's possible to put folders into folders.
Even though theoretically that's always been possible, it's only now that I've finished writing the interface for it, and been able to make it public.
This is quite a big update to the2012.02.26
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Sub-folders
Made quite a bit of progress on implementing a sub-folder organisation system to portfolio folders today. The hard part is making sure that the behaviour of the elements on the screen matches the expectations of people using it -- so, for example, things don't move into folders that they shouldn't (ie. creating infinite loops) and dragging things around doesn't move things into folders when it's expected that they should just re-order.2012.02.16
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Mobile
There's been a mobile version of CAGD for quite a while, but this weekend I made some good progress with it. Here's some screengrabs:
2012.02.11
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Reorganising the Front Page
One of the features of the old site that I'm told people are missing, is the timetable information that used to be displayed on the front page -- the one immediately after you log in. I've been working on reinstating this, and I've also taken the time to re-jig the Recent Activity column, to make it more useful.
Rather than just releasing it without warning anyone (which apparently I'm prone to do), I thought it would probably be a good idea to explain the changes I'2012.02.03
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Video Upgrade
Updated the JWPlayer Video Player to version 5.9, so there should be visible improvements in how video is presented, in particular on iOS devices.
I still have it on the back-burner to develop our own theme, rather than using a customised version of the Bekle one.2012.02.02
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Upload Types
Up until recently, the site could accept the following file types for regular uploads:
Video (mp4, avi, mov, mv4, 3gp and others)Audio (wav, aif, mp3 and others)Images (almost everything, except .psd)PDFs (multipage, single page)The resources section of groups used a different process, and stored a thumbnail image along with the original file.
What I've done recently is to make that process available to regular uploads, so in theory any type of file can be uplo2012.01.20