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Jun 28, 2026

Lecture Builder (Research Portal)

The Lecture Builder lets researchers and staff author structured lectures inside the research portal. One underlying model serves three uses, selected by the lecture type:

Type Use
Curriculum Teaching content that feeds the training curriculum (outline, sections, readings).
Talk A public lecture/seminar record — speaker, affiliation, schedule, venue, duration, recording & slides URLs.
Standalone A reusable authored lecture (ordered sections + media).

Concepts

A lecture has:

  • Core metadata: title, subtitle, summary, status.
  • Talk metadata (optional): speaker name & affiliation, scheduled date/time, venue, duration in minutes, recording URL, slides URL.
  • A curriculum_ref free-text link to a training curriculum item.
  • Ordered content sections.
  • A list of resources.

Sections

Each section has a heading, a Markdown body (rendered to safe HTML on save), an optional sort order, and optional media:

  • image, video, audio, or embed — provide a media URL and pick the type.

The Markdown renderer supports headings, bold, italic, inline code, links, unordered lists and blockquotes. All raw HTML in the source is stripped/escaped, so section bodies are XSS-safe.

Resources

Each resource is a labelled link with a type: reading, slides, video, link, or file.

Status & publishing

A lecture moves through: draft → scheduled → delivered → published → archived. The publish toggle is a shortcut that flips status between published and draft.

Screens

Screen Route Purpose
Lecture list /research/lectures Lectures grouped by type with quick "New" buttons.
Builder (new/edit) /research/lectures/builder Create or edit lecture metadata.
Lecture view /research/lectures/:id Sections, resources, status, publish/delete.
Section edit /research/lectures/section/:id Edit one section.

Data model

Three tables (InnoDB, utf8mb4):

  • research_lecture — one row per lecture (type, status, talk metadata).
  • research_lecture_section — ordered sections (body_markdown, body_html, media_*, sort_order).
  • research_lecture_resource — labelled resources (resource_type, url, sort_order).

Cross-subsystem references (e.g. the researcher table for ownership, or the training curriculum) degrade gracefully if those tables are absent.

Notes

This is the PSIS/AtoM port of the Heratio ResearchLectureService / ResearchLectureController, mirroring its data model and behaviour using AtoM conventions (Laravel Query Builder via the Illuminate Capsule manager, Symfony 1.x actions extending AhgController, and *Success.php templates).