I wonder if it'd be possible to make a setting that allows the administrator to display a count of private items and/or collections. Currently, if there are 11 items in a collection, and 1 is public and 10 are private, a user who isn't logged in sees "1 item" in the archive. If, instead, we could choose to have it display "1 publc item, 10 private items," that'd help a lot.
Interesting idea. It would be possible now to write a custom theme function to do this I believe. I'll have to think about it some more, though.
How would that information be useful to non-authenticated users? In what contexts would a site want to show how many private items it has?
Well, the context is that my students have built sites in which all the items are private, so when you go there without being logged in, it says "No items" and "No collections" and so on, so that you wonder why the site even exists! Or you assume it's under construction, when in fact it's done.
Of course, they could write custom HTML for the front page explaining the situation, but I think the system (or theme) could handle that by listing the count of public/private items for non-authenticated users.
Speaking of authentication, I've also noticed that none of the themes (that I've seen) have a "login" link by default in the navigation -- that'd also be a good idea.
Thanks Amanda. There is probably a way to indicate this with our current theme helpers. I'll investigate further.
As for the login link, we're planning to add this when we do another update to our themes. This will involve adding a call to an existing theme helper, link_to_admin_home_page(). You can add this now, anywhere in your public theme (like your footer), to add a link to your admin panel.