johnmcqueen's blog

Group home pages have been given a makeover on PBGworks. Here's a short video about the changes.

https://youtu.be/mcpDV2XC1JA

When you are logged in to PBGworks and viewing an article published to eXtension.org, you will now find some information about that article on the right side of the page.

You can find when that article was published, last updated, and get a link to view it on eXtension if it is published. A few more features to this block will be rolled out soon, including info if the page is not published.

I am happy to announce the publishing of content to eXtension.org! A lot of very dedicated people worked very hard to get these resources published to http://www.extension.org/plant_breeding_genomics. Thank you to all of the authors, contributors, reviewers, coordinators, and anyone else who helped to make this happen.

Some updates were made to the way eXtension articles are created on PBGworks. Part of this was removing the "Members" menu item that was on the left side of the screen when logged in. The "member list" list now found at the menu across the top of the website. This is viewable by the general public (folks not logged in) so make sure you update your profiles!

I updated the profile pages today, adding some new fields of information. You can now find fields for Short Biography, Projects and Interests, and Fun Fact. The field for Interests has now been renamed My Tags.

It is possible to upload additional images to your profile page if you wish. Click the Edit/Inset image button on the toolbar while editing your profile and click browse server in the next window to get to the image uploader. There are step by step image uploading directions here: http://pbgworks.org/node/177

I created a new webform for people that are requesting a member account to PBGworks. This is accessible by people not logged in. Initially, I let users create their own accounts but this proved to be a bit difficult to work with and we had some spam issues. Since we have limited numbers of people joining, it works fine to have a more control over this process. If there were people signing up daily there would have to be a way for people to sign themselves up. The form is emailed to me so I can set up the account.

Notifications for the PBGworks website are now operational. What that means is that all content (wiki pages, blogs, forums, comments, etc.) upon creation will send an email to the members of the group to which this new content is posted to.

For example, when David creates a new wiki page in his lab group, the members of the lab group will receive an email alerting them to this fact.

In efforts to make the group home pages a bit more clean in their layout a slight change has been made. Under the welcome message there was previously a list of all the content for that group listed in reverse chronological order in the "teaser" form. A teaser is a brief introduction to the information contained in that group post. The idea behind having a teaser list of this kind is that you can some to your group home page and see the latest content for your group. So if posts have been made while you are away from the site, you can easily see the most recent activity.

Due to some unforseen circumstances, the Tasks calendar was removed. I'm doubting that anyone was actually using it so I'm not too concerned about it. If you were using it, please let me know and I will do some more work on getting it restarted. Thanks.