Let's see how you can link some pages together to make a collection:
You just created your very first collection of pages in Mahara. You learned how to add some information for your collection. You also saw how easy it is to add and edit the pages for your collection by pulling from those pages that already exist in your portfolio.
You chose to add a navigational bar to your collection, which for Christophe looks like this:
You may be wondering what the collection would look like if you hadn't decided to include this navigational bar. The simple answer is, the individual pages would simply act as if they didn't belong to a collection and appear exactly the same as a normal page to a viewer.
So the question is, why would you put a page into a collection and not include a navigational menu? The answer basically relates to access. As well as being a way of linking pages together using physical links, a collection also links the access permissions of all the pages it contains.
If you had decided not to include the horizontal navigation bar, you could (and probably should) choose to add a vertical navigation block instead. You will learn about the vertical navigation block later in this chapter.
If you revisit the Share section of your portfolio that you looked at earlier, you will notice that your collection has appeared there:
You can set access permissions for the whole collection in exactly the same way as you would do for an individual page as well as when adding secret URLs. Of course, you can go back and edit this access at any time.
A collection automatically inherits the access of all the pages it contains. If one of your pages in the collection is being shared only with Person A and another with Person B, the collection will be shared with both Person A and Person B.
Pages can only belong to one collection at a time.
We've just seen that when you don't allow navigation on your collection, the pages look just as they would do as normal pages. There is a way to add a different navigational menu to your collection without using the default one that runs across the top of the pages — using the Navigation block.
Try removing the top navigational menu from your collection and copying in the navigation block. You will need to put the block on every page in the collection.
Here is what Christophe's collection looks like when using the navigation block rather than the default top menu: