Creating a LibGuide

When a course is not being offered for the academic year, the guide for that course may be unpublished until the course is offered again. In those instances, you may see a message similar to the image below on the unpublished guide.

This policy is to help prevent our course guide list from getting to cumbersome for students to browse and keep our collection current.

You may prefer to link your Course guides to a related Subject guide so that users can easily navigate from one to the other. If this is the case, there are two ways you can do this, listed below, each with their pros and cons.

1. Widgets that list each of the standalone Course guides.
2. Redirect URLs from subpages to standalone Course guides.

Course Guide Widgets

The main benefit of using a widget to include Course guides on a Subject guide is that once you've tagged the individual Course guides, you don't have to maintain any links. The widget list will automatically update based on which guides are published. 

Ex. if a Couse guide is unpublished or deleted, you don't have to worry about going to the Subject guide to remove the page or subpage with redirect URL, because the widget will automatically remove that guide from the list.

Add a Course Guide Widget

From your guide,

1. Create a new page by clicking on the Add Page button.
   1. Note: This new page should be named "Course Guides." 
2. Then, create a new content box by clicking the Add Box button. 
3. Click on the Add/Reorder button within the content box.
4. Choose Media/Widget.
5. Choose the Reuse Existing Widget tab from the pop up window.
6. Search for the Widget Name according to the table below.
7. Click Save.

Please note: In order for a course guide to show up on a list, you must include the tag (see below) on that guide.

Redirect URLs

Redirect URLs take less time to set up initially, but require careful upkeep when URLs are changed and Course guides are unpublished.

Ex. if you have a redirect URL to a Course guide on your Subject guide but change the publication status of that Course guide without hiding the page on the Subject guide, users will be taken to an error page. 

Add a Redirect URL

From your guide, 

1. Create a new page by clicking on the Add Page button.
   1. Note: This new page should be named "Course Guides." 
2. Create a subpage of your newly creating Course Guides page.
   1. Note: This subpage should have the same name in the same format at the Course Guide you are about to link.
3. Add the top of the subpage, click on the Page settings button.
4. Choose Redirect URL.
5. Paste in the URL to the Course Guide you want to include.
6. Click Save.

Note: You will need to make sure to hide or delete any subpages that redirect to Course guides that are no longer available so reviewing your Subject guides regularly will be very important.