Creating a New Smart Folder

     1.      Use the contents tab to navigate to the location where you want your Smart Folder to be located.

For this example, we are creating a Smart Folder that displays movie announcements. Because we want to display this Smart Folder under the News & Events heading in the navigation portlet, we navigated to the contents tab of the News & Events folder.

     2.      On the green menu bar, select add item (or add to folder, depending on your location) and then select smart folder from the drop-down menu.

     3.      In the Title field of the Edit Smart Folder page, enter a name for your Smart Folder.

     4.      If desired, enter a brief description of what the Smart Folder will contain.

     5.      Fill out the remaining options on the Edit Smart Folder page as desired. These options all affect the display of the contents “collected” by the search the Smart Folder will run each time it is clicked.

For this example, we want to use the default display options, so we have not changed any of the remaining fields.

     6.      Click save. The view tab displays a confirmation that your Smart Folder was saved. You will also see a reminder to execute the next step: defining the criteria for your Smart Folder search.

     7.      Click the criteria tab.

     8.      From the Field name drop-down menu, select a category that will serve as one of your search criteria and then click add.

In this example, we want to search for movies, which are stored as a particular Item Type (Event).

     9.      If you want to add another search category, select another field in the next Add New Search Criteria box.

In our example, we are only interested in events that are also movies, and we know that all of our movie event announcements have been assigned the keyword “Movie”. Therefore, we are adding Keywords as our second criteria category.

  10.      After you have added all of your search categories, select the values that should be searched for in each category.

We have selected the item type named Event and the keyword Movie because we want to view all movie announcements for our library.

  11.      If you have selected more than one value in a category, select whether the search should return items that match any of the values you have specified (pick the or operator) or whether the search should return only items that match all of the values (pick the and operator).

In our example, we have selected only one value in each category, so the operator has no effect. We will explore the effect of the operators later.

  12.      Click save.

  13.      To test your Smart Folder search, click the view tab. A list of all of the content items on your site that meet your criteria and are not expired is displayed in the main content area.

In the case of our example, we see a list of five movies. This represents all items on our site—no matter where they are stored—that are events and have been assigned the keyword “Movie”.

To illustrate the effect of the operators, let’s alter the criteria for the Reel Fun Smart Folder we just created and compare the results.

To start, we’ll select a second keyword criterion, Kids, and set the keywords operator to and.

After saving these changes, the Smart Folder search yields the following results:

The number of items returned has been reduced from five to three, because the search is now seeking only items that are events and have been assigned both the keyword “Movie” and the keyword “Kids”.

If we now change the keywords operator to or, we get the following results:

The list of results has grown to eight items because we are searching for events that have the keyword “Movie” or events that have the keyword “Kids.” As a result, three non-movie children’s events are now included in the results.

Incorporating Smart Folders into Your Site

You can add Smart Folders to any folders in your site and link to them from any page. Let’s look at a few ways we might use our new Reel Fun Smart Folder.

By default, newly created Smart Folders are displayed in the navigation portlet. After we completed the procedure in Creating a New Smart Folder, the newly created Reel Fun Smart Folder appeared in the navigation portlet under the News & Events folder, since this is where we created it.

With this configuration, a patron could click News & Events and then click the Reel Fun link to view the list of movies in the main content area.

If we do not want this link to appear on the navigation portlet, we merely have to click the Reel Fun Smart Folder link (to navigate to the Smart Folder), click the properties tab, click the Exclude from navigation check box, and click save.

Let’s say that we want to feature a link to the Reel Fun Smart Folder on our main News & Events page. Here is how we would add it:

     1.      Click the news & events tab or the News & Events link in the navigation portlet.

     2.      Click the edit tab.

     3.      In the Body Text area of the page, add the text for the new link.

In this example, we will simply add “or check out our movie schedule” to the end of the first sentence (see step 5 below).

     4.      Highlight the portion of the text that will be the link.

     5.      Click the  (Internal link) button.

     6.      In the left column of the Insert Link window, click Current folder to see the contents of the News & Events folder.

     7.      In the middle column, click the Reel Fun Smart Folder. Information about the Smart Folder is displayed in the right column.

     8.      Click ok.

     9.      Scroll down to the bottom of the Edit Page form and click save.

After the page has been saved, it is automatically displayed in the view tab.

  10.      To test your new Smart Folder link, simply click the link.

The results of the Smart Folder search are displayed in the main content window.