allow hand-crafted section names

[Zhang Weiwu]

The section naming convention has been discussed many[1] times[2] before[3]. Since it might not be possible to come up with a naming convention that pleases everybody, determined SchoolTool managers may wish to hand-craft ever class name following their own naming convention. To do so, they need to be able to disable any naming convention, so that sections are only identified by their name.

Even better, by specifying naming convention, like the FORMAT in date(1)[4]. For example:

%C %_
means: [Course Name] [Section name as typed by manager]

%C %K in %R
means: [Course Name] [Starting Calendar Week] in [Room Name]

%I %_
means: [Instructor Name] [Section name as typed by manager]

The first naming convention is what I am looking for for my current deployment. I would prefer the second when I can use schooltool to manage rooms.

This things are not very intuitive to school managers, but would help a lot when a site administrator or developer intend to help the users. I would prefer to keep them in configuration file to not to confuse school managers.

[1] http://lists.schooltool.org/pipermail/schooltool/2005-July/001397.html
[2] https://bugs.launchpad.net/schooltool/+bug/80064
[3] https://bugs.launchpad.net/schooltool/+bug/80021
[4] http://linux.die.net/man/3/strftime

P. S. I know the design lazyness or design ignorance of "put it in configuration file so we don't have to think how to design it" rarely gets best result. I post this here intending to get "second-best result" :) And it's not bad to have some sysop's voice here in addition to users and developers'

[Tom Hoffman (tom-hoffman)]

You can assign titles when you're importing from the spreadsheet (see Manage > XLS Import). That might be the best route.