Title: Front Page Sections

Traction's "Front Page" is an easily configured dashboard view that looks across all projects which the user can see. Sections on the Front Page determine what content to show and how to display it.

The Front Page is modeled on the front page of a newspaper, where you find headlines and items selected from the various newspaper sections, such as Business, Sports, etc.

In Traction, the Front Page normally has multiple sections that dynamically collect and display items from the projects that a given user has read rights to. See Sections Overview for more detailed information on the section settings.

A person with Server Administrator permissions can click the Front Page tab in Server Setup to access an Edit Section form specifically for the Front Page. When a Traction TeamPage server is first installed, the Front Page is set to use default settings for the sections. To customize the the Front Page sections, you can uncheck the Use Default Sections checkbox, at which point the Edit Section form will be shown to allow modifications to be made.



Many of the sections on the Front Page are used to collect together articles from multiple projects. The wildcard, *, is used to denote "all projects," so, for instance, when you look at a section with a Type of Label for headlines in all projects, the label syntax is "::*:headline."

Tip: If you have projects that you do not want Front Page sections to display articles from, you can use an expression in the Search box to filter out those projects. For instance, to exclude a project "Test" from a section with a Type of Recent Articles, you can enter an expression such as "(NOT ::Test)" and articles from the Test project will not appear in that section. If you are careful about how you name your projects, you can use the * wildcard to exclude groups of projects, such as several documentation projects that you named starting with "Docs." In this case, you could use an expression like: "NOT (::Docs* OR ::Test)" to exclude all documentation projects plus the Test project.

Note: All projects included in a section Search expression should be configured to provide Access permissions to the Everyone Group. Currently, if a user without access to one or more of the included projects views a page containing the section, the expression will not evaluate correctly and will fail to act as a filter on the section content.



Attachments:
FrontpageSectionsCheckbox.gif
Related Articles
Article: Doc586 (permalink)
Date: December 31, 2008; 10:15:57 AM Eastern Standard Time

Author Name: Paul Needham
Author ID: pan