Adding and Managing Course Materials
The course materials and this configuration guide have been created using book pages. The following pages have been created for your use. You will need to fill in these pages with the approved course descriptions for your courses, day-to-day activities, and course projects.
You can edit these and add your own. As each new page is added to a book, it is inserted into a menu structure much like a table of contents. Book pages have navigation elements for moving through the text, such as the previous, up, and next elements visible at the bottom of each book page. Drupal automatically generates the book navigation block which appears with this text.
Creating book pages
- Visit the create content page and choose to create a book page.
- Enter a Title for your book page.
- As with any other page, enter the text to display within the Body. You may turn the "rich text editor" on (if you want to use a word-processor-type interface) or off (if you want to enter HTML directly).
- You can click on Input Format to selece whether you want Drupal to filter your HTML (the rules will be listed) or render the text as "Full HTML."
- Select the Book Outline page to place the book page into the appropriate place in your book structure. If creating a new book for which there are no pages yet, choose <top-level>. Note: you can always edit an existing page and use the Book Outline setting to reposition a book page within the text.
- By default, book pages with the same parent are ordered alphabetically by title and given the default weight of 0. Use the weight to override the defaults. Lighter numbers (negative numbers) will rise to the top of the order; heavier numbers (positive numbers) will fall to the bottom of the order.
- You can experiment with the other settings as desired. Click on the category to expand the options. Drupal lets you add file attachments, set an URL alias (under URL path settings), leave the page unpublished, make it sticky at the top of lists, promote it to the front page, control whether users can comment, and more.
Other collaborative book features
- Use the printer-friendly version link visible at the bottom of any book page to generate a plain text, printer friendly display of that page and all of its child (sub) pages. This feature is useful for making a backup of all of your documents loaded into the course book.
- Use the outline tab when viewing any content type--blog, story, poll, forum, etc.--to add it into a book.
- Go to the books administration section (administer >> content management >> books) and select your book title from the sidebar navigation menu. There you can easily view a list of all pages in a book and change the order of them.