SCELCapalooza 2016

Public Discussion Boards
Engage with your community right in your site – both on a system-wide board for general conversation and on individual guides. I

• The System-wide board is available for general conversation among your community. Easily add the button to your homepage in the Admin > Look & Feel > Page Layout > Homepage area. If you have a custom guide as your homepage, you can add the link there (or anywhere) by adding /discussions.php to the end of your LibGuides CMS URL. (For example, http://testdrive.libguidescms.com/discussions.php)
• Guide boards are added like any other page in your guide. Add a new page and choose Discussion from the “Type” dropdown – boom! Discussion board! Like all other pages, you can reorder it / place it anywhere and set the visibility of the page. There are also a couple of Board Management options:
  • Notification Options – anything from manual addition of notifications discussion-by-discussion to “follow everything!”. Guide owners & editors set these notifications separately.
  • Guide Owners & Guide Editors can invite Patron-level users with the Invite Patron Users link.
• Tags for Internal and Public boards are separate. 

• one system-level board that all account holders have access to, so you can have those internal discussions, and
• one guide-level board for each guide in your system, where folks who have access to the guide can talk about things relating to that guide!

This is fantastic for the Publishing Workflow or for guide convos in general – instead of having to have conversations about the guide via email, you can have it in the guide’s Discussion Board!

Discussions can be marked as Questions, too, so you can ask questions and mark the Best Answer from the replies you receive. On Discussions that aren’t marked as Questions, you can mark a reply as Helpful, making it stand out on the page. Opt-in to emails to follow a Discussion and always be in the know on new replies, even if you don’t comment on the thread itself!

With mSites, you can make any site mobile-friendly using our handy redirect option – this catches anyone viewing the site using a mobile device and redirects them to your uber friendly mobile landing page. Plus, you can integrate widgets from LibCal, LibAnswers, LibSurveys, or any other site that provides widgets. It’s even super easy to add icons to your mSite thanks to the fully integrated Font Awesome icon library.

But why stop at creating mobile menus for your website? Let your imagination run wild! Create info sites / micro sites / interactive sites / app-like sites – whatever you want to call them. For example, create sites for: a self-led tour of exhibits, a self-led orientation / tour for folks to walk around the campus or library, classroom assessment / feedback opportunities, and so much more. We’re sure you all could think of a slew of ideas for learn-as-you-walk (or sit  ) tools!