Corners of Sakai 3 – Pseudo Hierarchy

Suppose you want to relate several Sakai sites together. Some use cases:

1. a project site membership has a created a series of subsites to take care of committee work
2. you want to allow users of Fall 2008 course site access to all previous course sites for same course. You can take care of the access issues – but how to make it easier for them to find these other sites?
3. a department needs to provide a set of documents to all courses in it. The sites of these courses need to appear as “children” of the departmental site.
4. etc.

What to do? Pseudo-hierarchy might fit the bill. Run up at an airport by Chuck Severance it establishes a user-interface-only relationship between the sites. This takes place in a breadcrumb that displays below the site navigation paraphernalia.

The full details are here: sakai_pseudo_hierarchy.doc.

The rendering bits are in any version of Sakai after 2.4.x. – to customize for your institution – add the following lines (36-53 in Sakai 2.5.x) from the default.css and then change to suit.

/*site hierarchy breadcrumb*/
#siteHierarchy{
        clear:both;
        float:none;
        margin:0;
        list-style: none;
        padding:.5em 0;
}
/*style the standard breadcrumbseparator
   can set display:none if needed because the
   list-style is taking care of it*/
.breadSeparator{
}
#siteHierarchy li{
        display:inline;
}
#siteHierarchy li a, #siteHierarchy li a:visited{
        color:#09c;
}

You can also add your own separator via the language bundle.