[Xerte-dev] Re: Modular Play and New Templates

Fri Feb 8 16:14:19 GMT 2013

Hi Julian

I updated a test install but then re-installed over the top so that your template installed in the database so at some point the relevant sql will need to be added to upgrade.php but I'm sure you're aware of that.

On this test install when viewing properties of either a bootstrap project or an xot project only the flash play.php shows now in the properties window.

play_bootstrap.php doesn't seem to play very nicely in IE whereas I'm sure http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/~cczjrt/boostrapLO did but that's now showing as forbidden. play_bootstrap.php plays ok in Chrome.

HTH

Ron

From: xerte-dev-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk [mailto:xerte-dev-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Julian Tenney
Sent: 08 February 2013 11:48
To: For Xerte technical developers
Subject: [Xerte-dev] Re: Modular Play and New Templates

I got it working, you can check it out and do an xampp install for a quick preview of what’s there so far.

Few observations on hooking it up:

- Ages ago, Pat, we talked about firing the data at an ad-hoc page – there is code in the wizard that posts it to wizard.runtime if set, so we did do it. Before I realised this, I set a property called runtime and used it to point the preview to preview_bootstrap.php. I can’t remember if anyone is actually using .runtime to use a different playout or not (I have vague memories of GEM doing this for their PBL stuff?). I could have just posted the data to a page, but then you lose all the security stuff.

- There is much the same code in the various play_, play_html5, play_bootstrap files that we ought to tidy up at some point.

- I’ve put my own set of .js libraries etc in the /common folder, so that duplicates some things like jQuery, so it would be better to load common libraries from a central place.

- I have no idea how hard it is to get appropriate urls showing in the properties tab for the play_, export, etc and have all that working when the template isn’t Nottingham.

- Otherwise it’s pretty straightforward to add new tools, especially if you can work with the xwd /  wizard for an editor, and jQuery makes it really easy to pick up the xml and drive the content. Once this penny drops I can see other people wanting to build their own templates and add them in, so it would be worth smoothing out some time. I can do that probably, but I’m not so sure what needs to be in place to make the properties panel more flexible?

Cheers,

From: xerte-dev-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk [mailto:xerte-dev-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Pat @ Pgogy
Sent: 08 February 2013 09:15
To: For Xerte technical developers
Subject: [Xerte-dev] Re: Modular Play and New Templates

Preview and play differ in terms of logged in access and password protection - but the display code should be in a library function.

Agree your code base should be shared - wondering if modules could share that. In theory you could add a play parameter to the info file and then probably share the rest of the code?

That might work better?

Pgogy Webstuff - http://www.pgogywebstuff.com

Makers of web things of a fair to middling quality

On 8 Feb 2013, at 09:04, Julian Tenney <Julian.Tenney at nottingham.ac.uk> wrote:

Well, it’s more that we have the same code in several places, and things like being able to get the runtime url in the wizard. I added a property to the wizard ‘runtime’ to point to my booststrap.php page. 

A related question: is there anything different between preview and play, or could I just use the same file for both?

From: xerte-dev-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk [mailto:xerte-dev-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Pat @ Pgogy
Sent: 07 February 2013 17:51
To: For Xerte technical developers
Subject: [Xerte-dev] Re: Modular Play and New Templates

I would assume we accordion the templates list?

Pgogy Webstuff - http://www.pgogywebstuff.com

Makers of web things of a fair to middling quality

On 7 Feb 2013, at 16:12, Julian Tenney <Julian.Tenney at nottingham.ac.uk> wrote:

Yeah, that’s pretty much what I’m doing. It will work and that’s fine, just wondering about the situation where there loads of these things…

From: xerte-dev-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk [mailto:xerte-dev-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Pat @ Pgogy
Sent: 07 February 2013 15:47
To: For Xerte technical developers
Subject: [Xerte-dev] Re: Modular Play and New Templates

Duplicate the modules xerte folder into modules new template name

Keep the edit php file as it is still xerte

Mangle play and preview to present the HTML

Pgogy Webstuff - http://www.pgogywebstuff.com

Makers of web things of a fair to middling quality

On 7 Feb 2013, at 09:46, Julian Tenney <Julian.Tenney at nottingham.ac.uk> wrote:

Question for Pat I think:

With the html5 playout, Fay has added play_html5.php that does the work, that’s all fine. I’ve got a new template I’d like to build in that produces this stuff:

http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/~cczjrt/boostrapLO. The editor is a standard xerte wizard / xwd thing, but it uses its own html page to parse the xml and create the content.

So I could add another html page to the folder and repeat what Fay has done for html5, but that seems a bit messy to sustain if, one day, we have loads of runtimes doing different things, I wondered if your modular stuff handled this in a more graceful way?

There’s another difference here: Fay’s html5 code plays existing content – so you have two alternative urls for the same piece, ultimately we’ll switch toolkits to use the html5 one as the default, and the old one will remain as a legacy. In my case, it doesn’t work like that, these projects will always only use their html page: so that needs to be the url to display in properties for the project, and I guess that’s what needs to export as well.

What do you think is the best thing to do?

Julian

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