[Xerte] Re: Hyperlinks, Navigation & Menus

[Julian Tenney]

Hopefully we can build a 2.18 pretty soon, I think most of the work is done, and it would be useful to have this used / tested before we release the toolkits stuff, which has a bit more going on,

From: xerte-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk [mailto:xerte-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Panke, Stefanie
Sent: 03 April 2012 17:40
To: xerte at lists.nottingham.ac.uk
Subject: [Xerte] Hyperlinks, Navigation & Menus

Hello!
First of all: Thank you for the many informative responses.  As usual, it took me some time to process everything. Here is what I have learned:

1.Creating menus for large/complex learning objects (Xerte 2.18):
The Menu Connector page by default lists all the pages in a project. However it has as optional properties a First Entry Page ID and a Last Entry Page ID. If you specify the first entry property then the menu Connector starts its menu from that page. If you specify the Last Entry Page ID then the menu ends with the specified last page.Thus you can break your learning object up into chapters with each chapter starting with its own menu page.
The menu connector has been modified to accept a list of page Ids. Thus, it is possible to provide at the start of the project ( but not as the first page in a desktop project, as the list of pages is not built by xerte until after the first page has loaded ) a menu that lists just the first page of each chapter or section in a project. If you want to then each first page in a chapter could then be a menu of the pages in that chapter. By ending your chapter with a redirector connector page you can then take the user back to the start menu that listed all the chapter / section start pages.

Currently, there is no such think as a menu connector page, is there? All of the above will be possible in Xerte 2.18, right? Is there a tentative release date for the 2.18 version scheduled yet?

2.Creating menus for large learning objects (Xerte 2.17) / alternatives:
- I found that Ron's suggestion describes exactly what I was looking for:"'Parts' (chapters?) are listed on the left, and when clicked on, 'Modules' (basically groupings of pages) appear in a sub menu on the right." Ron, did you develop this with Xerte 2.17? How did you do this? You mentioned you are using nested pages?
- Also, the example from edina.ac.uk (http://edina.ac.uk/digimap/support/digimapelearning/map.html) looks great. Actually, this is exactly how I would envision the final display for the book. Is this whole page developed in Xerte or just the modules on the right hand side?

3.Cross-references between Xerte learning objects: The way I envisioned this to work was simply to open another learning object at a specific page in a new window or tab, just like an external hyperlink. Since this seems to be impossible, I decided to either have one long and complex learning object or just link to the start page of the respective chapter - this should be simply the index html file of the respective Xerte directory, shouldn't it?

4. Relative hyperlinks: Special thanks to notifying me to my error regarding the relative hyperlinks. I somehow had this idea that the rlo is its own container.

5. CSS link types and glossary: I will just wait and see how this turns out in Xerte 2.18.

Best,
Stefanie


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