Smart folders

To demonstrate how Smart Folders can work, I will work through an example. The RMIT Climate Change Adaptation Program had prepared lists of researchers working on climate change at RMIT.  They wanted to group the researchers according to topics. For example, they wanted to show all those working on issues related to water on one page.

Given that they had already made a page for each person, it didn't make sense to manually make new pages for each topic area.  It seemed like too much work.

Instead, they set up smart folders for each topic area.  Here is how they did it.

Creating the basic Smart Folder

1. Log on to the Global Collaborative
2. Add the required topics to each relevant page.   That is, is a researcher is working on Water, make sure that "water" appears on the pages somewhere.  You can see from Peter Coloe's page that they did this by added a list of topics at the bottom of the page.
3. Navigate to where you want your new Smart Folder to live.
4. From the [Add Item] menu, choose [smart folder].
5. Provide a Title and Description, as you would for any other folder.
   I am going to ignore the other options on this page.  They are not necessary for this example.
6. [Save] your new Smart Folder. You will now see a new page which says "There are currently no criteria on which to search. Please add them using the 'criteria' tab."

Adding search criteria

1. As the new page suggests, choose the [Criteria] tab. This allows you to set up search criteria that will be used to create your Smart Folder.
2. In the 'Add new search criteria' box, choose [Search text] from the list. The criteria type will change to [Text].
   NB: There seems to be a bug in some browsers.  You may not be able to use your mouse to choose [Search text].  If so, just use the down-arrow key to move through the list until you reach [Search text].
3. [Add] that search criteria.
4. You will now be able to type in the text that you want to search on.  Under the 'Criterion details', type your search text.  In this case, I typed
   water
   Your Smart Folder will now find every page on the Global Collaborative that contains the word 'water'.
   
5. Tick the check box and [Save] your first search criteria.  Strictly speaking, you don't need to save until you have added all your search criteria.  However, my motto is "Save early.  Save often."
   
6. Now we need to tell the Smart Folder where to find the water researchers.  In the 'Add new search criteria' box, choose [Location] from the list. A [browse...] button will appear that will allow you to browse for the right location.
7. [Browse...] to the folder that contains all the sub-folders that you want to search. A new window will appear.  In this case, we want to search the CCAP Researchers by name folder.  So we browse to the folder above it, and then [insert] the folder we want. [Close the window].
8. We want to search all of the sub-folders to the CCAP Researchers by name folder, so we choose the [Search Sub-folders] tick box.
9. That's it.  [View] the new page, using the View tab at the top of the page.  It will show a list of researchers working on water related issues.

There are other options that we could explore, but that will get you there for the time being.

Other notes

Be aware that some punctuation marks and special characters (e.g. ampersands and colons) seem to be treated in some weird way.  You may find that you may not be able to use them as your search criteria.  Or you might need to enclose your search criteria in quotation marks.

An alternative tutorial is available on the Learn Plone site: Creating and Using Smart Folders by samk.