ADR 10: Tracking weeks

Context

Every course activity and associated page belongs to specific week of the semester. The week number should be displayed in the menu and used to order pages.

Week numbers should be also used to hide all future activities from students or activities after some specific week. Some activities may span more then one week, for example assignments that are assigned several weeks before they must be completed.

Decision

We decided to allow assigning a week number to every page. The week number is specified either in the page content or in the beginning of the file name.

In the contents it is specified as an XML attribute of the root element. Optionally, in addition to the week attribute, the publication-week attribute may be specified. In Markdown format, week and publication-week are specified as metadata of the page.

The week number can be also specified in the beginning of the file name (for example: 01-lab.xml, but not lab-01.xml). Week specified in the page contents has higher priority.

Status

Accepted.

Consequences

The decision gives an explicit representation of weeks instead of simply ordering pages by filename and specifying week number in their titles.

This allows automated processing of content based on weeks. In addition to hiding future weeks, it allows to generate an overview of the course with list of all pages arranged by weeks and folders.