atutor.no
Just a short note to reasure you that this blog is in fact not dead, even though it looks like it!
The reason for the lack of posts lately are partly because I have been in Argentina eating beef for a few weeks, and partly because I've been busy with other non-ATutor related work. However, the NST are soonish starting to roll out our new theme, meaning we will stop using the Redux theme and port all courses to the Hopper theme. After that there is the new 1.6.2 version coming up which will be exiting to see!
The NST has also hired a new developer starting early December who will work mostly on ATutor, which also should boost posts here a bit!
The NST will also attend Online Educa Berlin in early December, so you might look forward to some reports from that too! If you're in Berlin, be sure to visit our stand!
The observant reader will notice the redesign on these pages, which means it's theming time again!
The new Hopper theme for ATutor only exist at my localhost so far, but to get some initial feedback and to be able to test it on more browsers than those available on my localhost, I adapted some features from it here on the blog part of atutor.no (which is the Drupal part).
Background
The Redux theme was initially created to mimic the look and feel of the default theme for ATutor 1.5, in an effort to create a table free theme for that ATutor version. The Hopper theme is still based on much of Redux, but for other reasons. First of all it's not designed to mimic a look, but to create a new look, and maybe more important it will change some of the GUI elements we know from ATutor now, probably making it the most different ATutor theme when ready.
Why Hopper?
I don't really take theme names very seriously, but everything needs a name. This is named after the late great Edward Hopper, because I like his art, and I used his picture Nighthawks for the initial banner when I first started working on the new theme, and borrowing some colors from it.
(It's the banner you see here now, but it will not be the banner it ships with, nor the banner for these pages for a very long time, for obvious reasons).
Main changes
The new look will have stronger colors and contrast than Redux, and the whole top bar + banner section is higher, creating more air and giving us the possibility to use a bit larger banner images. Hoppers top section, banner, main and sub menu is around 180 pixels high, while the equivalent for Redux is around 140 pixels.
More important is that the javascript for the showing and hiding of the side menu is completely replaced and rewritten with the use of jQuery! This has some good sides and probably some bad sides too. First the good ones:
- jQuery is both cool and very elegant.
- ..and it's also included in ATutor by default, allthough I don't really know what it's used for (?)
- it's all in the head! all inline javascript that was used for the side menu is removed, and replaced with around 20 lines in the head, making the code less obtrusive, easier to understand, and also making it much simpler to create even new themes based on the Hopper theme.
- most important for us: the previous side menu would only work if the menu was absolute positioned in CSS, which had the side effect that you could only use a flexible site width in your themes, not a fixed one (like atutor.no is). With the new method you can use what you'd like, and the CSS is far simpler!
bad sides:
- This really doesn't matter much for me compared to the good sides, but there are some additional Kb's to load for the user. On the other hand, javascript is cached, and jQuery is good to have available anyways - we use it increasingly for course content too, now that the custom head feature is available in ATutor.
- Probably something else too - I haven't tested it on other browsers than Firefox 3 and Safari on Mac, which is where you can help!
Test it!
The only place it can be tested so far is here, on the blog part of atutor.no, and the only thing to test is how the the side menu works (click "toggle side menu" above the menu), and also see if the design burnes your eyes out or not! Comments are open and welcome, more posts to come as we go!
Keeping track of comments can be hard, but in Drupal world there's a module for everything, and I just added two of them to this site!
Now you can subscribe to comments on specific posts by e-mail, by checking a box below the comment field on any page.
Personally I prefer RSS, and have added a comment RSS module as well. You can subscribe to all comments on atutor.no with this URL:
..or you can get comment RSS for specific posts - these are autodiscovered when wieving a post, and you'll find the subscribe icon in your browsers address bar, if using a proper browser.
Happy commenting!
After a few buzy weeks here at atutor.no, there will be around 3 very slow weeks now, as we're either on a beach, in Dublin or Copenhagen, thinking of everything but ATutor and web development!
Tada till then!
Just a small note to announce our contributions list. This is where you will easily find the patches, modules and howtos we produce, and where we will update them if bugs are found. They will also link to any blog posts we might have written about them.
In this way you can follow the blog if you'd like, but also have a way to easy get the goods without following the blog!
We'd be happy to accept contributions here from others, and also to test them out and spotlight them on the demo server!
Finally we have our own demo server up! We will use this primarily to test our own features, modifications and themes, and also to have an additional place to show off ATutor!
As of now there are two demo courses available, the first is the Look at me, I'm a course! course where you can check out the very cool directory improvements that Gorzan made! (Note, you will have to register at the platform to see this).
In this course there is also the testing the test features tests, which is a small test where all question possibilities in ATutor is added.
The other course is Module 3 of the Medical Peace Work course that we made. Note that it's only used for demonstration features here, so see medicalpeacework.org if you wish to take the whole course. I've added this course as it has a distinct look and feel, and uses the "banner" feature on the front page, which the "look and me" course does not.
Please register on the demo server, and enroll in the courses! As of now we have not created an open demo account, nor an open instructor account, as this can be used at the official ATutor demo site. If you'd like this, or have any other comments, comment away, either in the blog comments here, or in the forums at the demo server!
