Remaking the BBS: Category Organization
In this last entry in the "Remaking the BBS" series, we're going to look at the new tool for creating and organizing categories. This tool is only available to faculty, TAs, and staff working on a course.
The current BBS administrator is a confusing mess of category setup, category options, group setup, user options, and a whole lot of other features which we simply do not use. Most faculty and TAs never venture into the BBS administrator for this reason. We wanted to make the basic setup of a BBS as simple as possible, and here's the result of these changes:
As you can see, it's pretty simple: on this page, you can create categories and category headers, and that's it. Category headers, in case you don't know, are just that: headers under which other categories can be grouped. You can't post a message in a category header. You can only post a message in a category. Category headers in the screenshot above are "Exercises" and "LiveTalks." As you can see, a category doesn't have to exist under a header. Categories can stand alone.
To reorder the display of categories and headers, you drag and drop the categories (or headers) into the desired location.
If you need to change any of the category options covered in a previous post, you do that on this screen as well.
We think this is a lot simpler and a lot more organized than the current BBS administration setup. If you think otherwise, or have any questions or comments about this, please let us know by posting a comment below!