Allow for more than one cover letter

[Kristina Hoeppner]

As Mahara can be used flexibly, I would not make / keep the cover letter as part of the resume because that would mean that you can only have one cover letter, whereas you may want to stick to one resume but change cover letters according to whom you want to address them. Of course, you can always use a text box, but maybe an option would be to allow for more than one cover letter and then let people choose which one to use in the end. This would be particularly interesting if you want to publish your entire resume and not just individual fields.

[Robert Lyon (robertl-9)]

Would it be useful to have the cover letter be either the free text box or allow one to choose a document (.doc/.pdf/.odt) file from the list of user's files?

Or would that just complicate things?

[Kristina Hoeppner (kris-hoeppner)]

If you choose a document like PDF, you don't need to use the cover letter as you just display the PDF now in 1.8 as embedded file. I don't know how many people use the cover letter, but if people do then it would need to be multiple text boxes.

Personally, I'd not give anything but a PDF to someone or have the CV visible on a webpage rather than ODT / DOC.

This is actually much bigger and should be part of a reworking of the resume section (Klaus Himpsl-Gutermann had that idea) so that users could also create different versions of the resume, e.g. for different positions, in different languages etc.

[Gregor Anželj (gregor-anzelj)]

Europass XML schema in the newset version 3.3.0 supports multiple cover letters. Maybe it would be a good idea to see how did they handle this and/or what fields did they use.

There is also an online editor for creating cover letter, available at https://europass.cedefop.europa.eu/editors/en/cl/compose

[Kristina Hoeppner (kris-hoeppner)]

Gregor, thanks for the heads-up. We haven't worked on the resume in ages. It really needs a major overhaul.