[Xerte] Xerte Online Toolkits Beta Program

[Julian Tenney]

Good people,

We have begun a beta for a new suite of tools for browser-based
authoring. If you are already familiar with pageTemplates.xtp and would
like your users to use it directly in a browser window, with no need to
download and install Xerte this will be of interest, and we would love
some help in testing it out. The tools are all free and open source.

Toolkits aims to bring simple authoring tools to less technical
developers and subject matter experts, who want to create content with
no scripting. Content is created by adding pages and configuring them
using the Xerte wizard. Over 30 types of page are available currently,
and you can extend and customise the system with your own templates to
meet specific needs. Examples are


You'll need a LAMP or WAMP web server handy (even a localhost such as
the one set up by XAMPP will do for testing). You can download the code
for your web server from http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/xerte/toolkits.htm.

To install this on a localhost:

- download and install xampp (or use an existing localhost)
- download the toolkits zip file
- extract the files to a folder on your web server (on my machine it is
c:\xampp\htdocs\toolkits)
- start apache and mysql in the xampp control panel
- navigate to http://localhost/toolkits/setup/ (where 'toolkits' is the
folder you created in the pevious step)
- Complete the information required. For a simple xampp setup, follow
the on-screen instructions.

The current version is 0.8. We are using the code here in production
now, so are fairly confident about the tools themselves. What we want to
do is make it easy for other people to install and use, which requires
some testing as people have different web server setups.

We anticipate version 0.9 when we think we have an installer that will
succeed if you meet the software's requirements. We're hoping this will
be sometime around the end of October.

Version 1.0 will be the first 'release' version where we don't expect
any major bugs. We're hoping this will be sometime around the end of
November.

We will post information here as the files are updated and revisions
released.

Many thanks,

Julian