Rationalize the tools automatically created in the !admin and ~admin sites
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Andrea Schmidt July 21, 2024 at 1:10 PM
Setting to verified. I haven’t run into any problems in the last few weeks (and I’m in as admin daily). Having the link on the Home page to get to the Administration Workspace is nice.
25x: https://trunk-maria.nightly.sakaiproject.org/, build: 9f7c86fe
Andrea Schmidt June 9, 2024 at 1:21 PMEdited
With the link in the Admin > Home for Administration Workspace, pinning the site is not necessary, as you pointed out. Yes, the QA nightly servers usually have a lot of sites pinned!
Of the tools I use regularly, I haven’t run into any issues with the changes. Everything is available through the Administration Workspace.
Charles R Severance June 8, 2024 at 2:30 PM
So - the “pre-pinned” stuff is a nightly-specific thing - it was there to (a) speed QA folks to not have to subscribe to a bunch of sites and later (b) test the convert favorites to pins code - and is ugly in general. We can revise that (and pre-pin !admin) but that is a nightly-only thing.
The pure out-of the box of a fresh Sakai install is captured in the “Home” and “Workspace” screen shots attached to this JIRA. Out of the box, no user (including admin) has any pinned sites and are placed in Home. This is why in the Overview button on ~admin I placed a link to !admin and not much else. Once they press that link they are in Admin Workspace as shown in the Workspace screen shot and can pin it if they so desire.
You can see the feresh OOTB experience at my qa server - which I just reset to master:
https://qasak.sakaicloud.com/portal
We might want to just change how we pre-set the nightly servers. There is a bunch of cruft in there that I bet could be deleted to make them function better for our purposes.
Andrea Schmidt June 7, 2024 at 11:33 PM
My 2 cents, (I haven’t really done any testing but need to be in there for setup), the Administration Workspace should be automatically pinned since that is where admins will be doing their work.
Automation for Jira June 6, 2024 at 3:13 AM
A pull request has been created, "SAK-50189 - Clean up ~admin tools for new installs", you can see it at https://github.com/sakaiproject/sakai/pull/12642
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Charles R SeveranceReporter
Charles R Severance
In Sakai the admin account has two sites. (1) The Administrator’s Home Site (~admin) and the (2) The site where the actual administration is to be done (!admin). One reason these are separate is that we can allow multiple users to administer the system without requiring sharing of the “admin” log in password.
When we build a new feature (say Plus) that requires an Administration tool, we make sure to add that tool to the !admin site - and often the tool is written in such a way that it notices when it is in the !admin site and presents any admin-only UI elements.
Over the years, a number of “admin ui” tools have been added to the “~admin” and “!admin” sites, leading to confusion for new administrators as to what site to use for what purpose.
This Jira proposes to remove unnecessary duplicate tools from the “~admin” Home Site and rename that site to “Admin Home” to make things clearer. There might be a few tools that we do leave as duplicate, perhaps to allow the “admin” user to repair something wrong in the “!admin” site (i.e. they were removed from the !admin realm by another administrator) - or perhaps not - we can discuss the right way to do this.
The overall goal is to have the administration tools only in !admin and not in ~admin as much as possible to reduce confusion.
As a side note, this will only apply to initial server setup of fresh installs (i.e. on the nighties) - there will be no conversion script for this as the administrators of existing servers can (and probably have) tweaked the configurations of these sites to their liking - so not need to adjust the already existing sites.
This is an easy back merge to 23.x but it is probably fine to to just have this in master and 25. I folks like it and want it in 23 make a comment.
Note: This does not have a database conversion and that is on purpose. For existing systems, anyone can simply edit their ~admin site by hand to accomplish everything in this JIRA. And if we tried to automate what happens in this Jira in a conversion script, it might unnecessarily step on local modifications that sites have already made in ~admin.