Courses

If a college / school / discipline / organisational unit wishes to list its courses on its website, a number of steps must be followed.
And often, course directors wish to have short web addresses for their course pages.
Everything you need to know is outlined here: Configuring Course Sections in t4.

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Keywords fuel the website's course search but can also be used for Search Engine Optimisation.
All is explained in Keywords in T4 (SEO & Courses).

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Courses are subject to an extra workflow in the CMS.
This prevents you from approving the course - only designated approvers can do that.
Even if you are a designated course approver, you still cannot 'Save & Approve' courses - you have to click 'Save changes' and then approve it in a separate step.

To approve a single course, first install the 'Enable Approve' bookmarklet on your browser (by simply dragging it to your bookmarks bar). Then:

Edit the course content type - click 'Save changes' to save the changes.
You'll be returned to the section's content list.
The content's 'Actions' -> 'Approve' option will be disabled.
Click the 'Enable Approve' bookmarklet to enable it.
Click 'Actions' -> 'Approve'.
The approval screen will load, filtered to show that content only.
Click 'Actions' -> 'Approve'.
In the pop-up window, click 'Approve'

Alternatively, you can save changes to multiple courses and then approve all your updates by doing the following:

Click on the 'Content' option, on the left hand menu
Click on 'Approve Content'
Filter the list by your name (just above the list, on the right hand side)
Select all listed items (click the checkbox on the very right of the list's header)
Click 'Approve', at the bottom of the list.
In the pop-up window, click 'Approve'

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Simply log a ticket, via the ISS service desk, requesting it.
However, be warned - you will not simply be the approver of your own courses. You will be an approver of all courses.
This means you will receive an email from t4 every time someone updates any course on the system.

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The Error

When editing a course, you may encounter the following error, when you try to save it:

Error you can get when saving courses with character count issue

This is because the course was last edited in version 7.4 of the CMS. We are now on version 8.3, which is far less tolerant of editing rule breaches.

Whenever you encounter this error, you know that someone put more than the maximum number of characters into one of the course fields. Version 7 let them away with it but the latest version (which lets you know that your text is too long as soon as you move away from the field) expects to already know about any problem fields by the time you try to save. If it hasn’t detected the problem (because you never went near the field that has the too-long text, while you were editing), the save fails. At this point T4 knows that something has gone wrong, but it is not sure why – hence the strange error that says nothing.

How to find the problem

To identify the field(s) with too-long text, do the following:

Edit your course content type
(If you’ve just encountered the error, you’re already editing it – so just scroll up to the top)
Click into the first field (‘name’)
Click into each field in turn - do this until you notice the background of one of the fields going light-red, when you leave it. You’ve found a field that contains more text than there is space for.
Correct the problem (for more information on this, see below).
Continue to click into each field until you get to the bottom (just in case there are more errors)
Save and approve your changes.

Fixing the problem

Now that the problem field has gone light-red, you’ll notice some red text at the bottom. E.g.:

Error banner informing user that the HTML entered is too long

This tells you the maximum number of characters for that field.
Reduce the text length to below the limit – the red background colour will disappear as soon as you do.

Tip: If you wish to count the characters quickly, install the bookmarklet we provide on your browser (see item #5 on this list: https://www.universityofgalway.ie/t4/bookmarklets/#useful)

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Course Field Max Lengths

Character length includes the characters in the text and additional HTML characters used for formatting. For example, if we look at the heading above:

Visible characters would have a count of 24 characters with spaces included - 'Course Field Max Lengths'

The count including HTML characters used for formatting is actually 33. - <h3>Course Field Max Lengths</h3>