Time for action—adding some folders and files to your Portfolio
- Click the My Portfolio option on the Main Menu. By default, the My Views tab will be selected. We will be using this area later to create some more views, but for now, click on the My Files tab.
- We recommend that you start by creating yourself a file structure of folders just as you would do on your laptop or desktop computer. Don't worry about getting them perfect, because you will be able to edit this structure later. Enter the name for your first folder, and click Create folder. In the example below, Janet Norman has created a folder in her portfolio called Social:
- You should now see the folder that you have just created. By the side of it you have the options to edit or delete it. Let's add some more details to our new folder by giving it a description. Click the Edit button.
- You will now see a new section appearing below. Write in your description for your folder. This will appear in the information next to the folder under the heading Description. When you have finished, click Save changes.
- Go ahead and make as many folders as you like.
- We're ready to start adding files. Click into one of the folders you just made. You will notice that there is an option at the top of the page called Upload file. You will need to check the Yes button to agree that the file you are going to upload is yours.
- Under the File option, click Browse and search for a file on your own computer that you would like to add to your Mahara Portfolio. Choose the file you want and click Open. You will see a spinning progress wheel that is telling you that your file is uploading. Be patient and let Mahara do its work—the larger the file, the longer it takes to upload. When the file has uploaded, the spinning progress wheel will turn into a confident check mark and you will see that your file has appeared in your files area. Below you can see that Janet has uploaded a video of herself talking about her hobbies called 'myHobbies.mov':
What just happened?
You have just used the My Files area of your Mahara site. You have learned how to set up a folder structure and uploaded your first file. In the example, Janet Norman uploaded a video file (.mov), but the file you upload in Mahara can be almost anything: a word-processed document, a spreadsheet, an audio clip, a PDF, and so on.
You may have noticed that when you uploaded your file there was a small message indicating that your file has been uploaded. These helpful messages appear from time to time in Mahara—to close them, just click on the little cross button to the right of the message:
Let's just reflect a little on some of the other things we came across during the file upload process.
Giving structure to your folder tree and branches
Although it is possible to make modifications to your folder structure at any time you wish, it is a good idea to work out how you want to organize your folders right from the very beginning. Here are some options for you to think about:
- You could set up folders by file type. For example: video (mp4, avi, ogv), audio (mp3), doc (odt, odp, ppt, ods, xls), images (png, gif, jpg), and so on.
- You could set up folders by audience (for example, friends, colleagues, finance, sales team, and so on).
- You could set up folders by content or topic (for example, electrics, lathe, cutting, and so on).
- You could set up folders according to commonly known in-house reference codes (for example Class3A, Topic7a(ii), and so on).
- ...or any way you wish.
The key point is that you should try to keep things organized. Later in this chapter we will see how you can use tags to be even more organized.
Copyright
Before you uploaded your file you had to check a box acknowledging that you hold copyright over or have the right to reproduce the material you are about to upload. Legal ownership over files you publish will be your personal responsibility, so please do not upload material you are not allowed to upload. You can always link out to existing material published by other people on the Web if you need to, and we will show you how to do this in the next chapter. But, just to remind you again, you will have the legal responsibility for stuff that you upload into your files area.
Upload limit
In the Time for action section, you may have noticed a Quota block appearing on the right-hand side of the screen that looked a bit like this:
This useful information tells you how much storage space you have in your site Quota. By default, this value is 50.0MB. You can see in the above example that Janet has used 20.8MB of her quota, which is 42% of what she is allowed according to the progress bar. As you upload more files you will notice the progress bar moving across this space to indicate what percentage of your allocated space you have left. Should you feel that you need to have a larger quota allocated to you, get in touch with your Mahara tutor or administrator.
Let's have a look now at how we can edit, delete, and move our files, as well as tagging them.
Moving and deleting files
You will probably enjoy playing around with Mahara's files and folder structure. Wherever you see a folder named Parent folder, click into it to jump up to the parent folder. To move files around different folders, just click them and drag them into the folder where you want them to be. Fun isn't it? This facility is similar to the block drag and drop we saw in the last chapter when adding a textbox to our Profile Page. It is powered by JavaScript and is one of the many fun features Mahara has to offer.
To delete a file, simply click on the Delete button to the right of it. To the right you will also see an Edit button—clicking this button drops down a handy little section that allows you to enter some information for the file:
Try giving your file a Description and click Save changes.
Uploading more than one file
New to Mahara 1.2 you now have the ability to upload more than one file at a time. This is a great time saver, especially if you have lots of files to add to your Portfolio in one go. Let's see how you can do it.