Parents ePortal screen

[mcloum]

Hi all,

 

Im just in the process of setting up parental access to eportal. I've generated a username and password for 1 child but when i login the information shown is very basic and doesnt look useful at all. are there any examples of how people have laid things out and what extra information they have included?

 

Screenshots would be good, key information blurred out obviously

 

Cheers

[NotSoFast]

On a slightly different note, we are trying to customise the look and feel of Eportal for various audiences. I've found one post on here mentioning editing the CSS, and I know it's possible form other sites I've seen, but when we made a few minor changes nothing happened. I'm very confident with CSS but don't know anything about JSP or - really - Eportal: it's not my main job. Is it necessary to restart the server or anything to get changes picked up? How happy are Serco to support customised Eportal stylesheets?

 

Thanks,

 

Simon

[donalouise]

Hi

 

You need to restart the ePortal services to get any changes picked up.

[NotSoFast]

Thanks for this, but...

 

apparently our data manager tried it and it didn't work. Does anyone have any other ideas? (Maybe we were editing the wrong files?)

 

Simon

Edited March 18, 2010 by NotSoFast

[donalouise]

If it's the bitlets you want to change you need to edit the bitlet.xml file. It should be in \eportal\Facility\ePortal\webapps\eportal\conf. Once these have been edited you then need to restart services and the changes should be present. This is the route I took and everything seemed to work OK.

[SkywOrca]

The style sheet that's in use is configured in the eportal\webapps\eportal\styles\ccimportstyle.css file. This is actually a redirect file to the actual css file that's currently in use (by default this is currently the custom/facilityserco2.css file). You would either need to edit the file that is your current redirect, or alternatively you could create a copy of your own and change the filename in ccimportstyle.css.

 

You may notice, however, that there are a number of things that your style changes don't affect, you can't change the font colour on the main login page for instance and several of the bitlet grids won't change with your new style definitions. This is due to various factors, sometimes there are hardcoded styles in the html that the system generates, other times it's from custom style sheets that are stored in the js folder, which would get overwritten with each reinstall. By and large, the success of your own style tweaks will boil down to how much you want to change, so it might end up being something of a compromise.

 

On the topic of the view that is available to parents, I believe most schools in Birmingham are happier with the limited view that comes as a default, several even limit it further by disabling results or events due to various factors like inappropriate data recorded in the system or results being visible before they should (I'm thinking GCSE and A-Level results days for instance). However, if you really want to add extra items into the parent view you probably can, it's simply a case of adding in the extra bitlet definitions you want under the contact bitletscreen element. You should always vet any amendments you make this way, however... it is possible that some bitlets might not function correctly when access via a different login type. Also, bear in mind that sometimes adding in a new bitlet opens up access that goes beyond what you might expect, they might well have the more button available, which might allow the parent to get into sections of the system that they really shouldn't, like a student search window, perhaps. If this does happen then your parents might get access to other students data, which would be a major breach of the DPA.

[john]

results being visible before they should (I'm thinking GCSE and A-Level results days for instance).

 

Sorry to nitpick, but if you check the E-portal handbook it tells you how to prevent this, its in the handbook, it also is in the Summer Exams Check pack that comes to you via Firstline every summer and its well documented so the A Level and GCSE Results don't appear earlier than they should.