25 November 2013, 3:19

Is there a way to have friendly urls for files?  I want to be able to add files using the TinyMCE editor, but when I select the image icon I have to add a url to an image.  I want to be able to add an image using a friendly url that I have upload to my files.  I want to be able to add images within a section instead of having to add two separae items.

Melissa

25 November 2013, 5:35

26 November 2013, 5:42

TinyMCE can control how the text looks in the paragraph (what is between the "a" tags.  But the href is still going to be not logical.  That means that I have to look up the file outside of the page that I am working on to find the obscure URL and then manually paste it in.  I don't have a problem with the manual part.  It is having to look up the URL, because it is a number that is the problem.

The pages my students are making are charts with text below them.  There could anywhere from 9 on a page (different types of clouds) to 50 on the page (maps of the US states).  It is a pain to have to create a separate block for each picture and text  (total of 100 blocks on a page).  It is just easier to make a table, and the put the data in the table.  But if the image URLs are all numbers, that method is a pain as well.  It would have been nicer if the URL could have been:

http://mahara.org/user/file/georgia.jpg

http://mahara.org/user/file/newyork.jpg

What about implementing a system similair to mediawiki.  If you want to link to another page, you just type in [[linked page name]], and if you want to include an image you just type in [[image:my included image]].  Simple, clean, easy to understand.

Melissa

26 November 2013, 7:40

Hello Melissa,

We already have a wishlist item for adding images more easily to a text box / journal entry on our tracker: https://bugs.launchpad.net/mahara/+bug/836382

Cheers

Kristina

26 November 2013, 11:43

Actually it looks like Melissa has commented on that issue (back in 2011) and even made some helpful suggestions for implementation.

Interesting, we even got as far as a gerrit patch for this, back in 1.5. https://reviews.mahara.org/#/c/819/

It would be great to be able to get some sort of TinyMCE image picker working. I suppose the reasons it hasn't been a critical priority are because 1) we've never had funding for it; 2) working with TinyMCE tends to be non-trivial; and 3) there's the workaround of using Image blocks and/or pasting in those awkward URLs. But certainly, there are a lot of users who want more fine-grained control over image placement, who would appreciate being able to intersperse them into rich text.

Cheers,

Aaron

26 November 2013, 12:13

I really like the idea of adding MediaWiki-style "markdown" for linking to your other Mahara pages and images. There are some complications that could be tricky to work out though.

First off, a user can have multiple Pages & Collections with exactly the same name. Perhaps you could extend the markdown to provide for specifying the Clean URL string and/or Page ID if you needed to disambiguate, like [[My Page;url:mypage;id:9]].

Second, there's the access control issues... although those are not much different from the access control issues we currently face. The markdown could actually help with this, because it makes it easy to identify internal links. Whenever you're saving a markdown field, you could pass it to a validation function that checks whether the pages you're linking to are less permissive than the current page; and you could pass it to another function that identifies links to files and sets up access for them.

Thirdly, it breaks the "what-you-see-is-what-you-get" aspect of TinyMCE. While editing the text, the user sees markdown; while viewing the page, they actually see the image. I don't think this would be a huge problem, though. It's similar to how Moodle filters work, and I've never heard anyone complain about those. But it's something to keep in mind. A TinyMCE plugin for adding internal links and images fits in more consistently with the TinyMCE user interface.

(That said, I'm not really in love with TinyMCE. It's got so many little buttons, and so many clicks to make things work)

Cheers,

Aaron

26 November 2013, 20:32

What about adding a "mediawiki" type block (markup language block)?  There is the Text block which is TinyMCE and there is an HTML block, so just add another one that would be MediaWiki (or markup language) type of block.

I looked at Mahara back in 2011 when I was homescholing my children.  I stepped away from it when I stopped homeschooling, and I became pregnant.

I am now again homeschooling one of my children, and we are using Mahara a lot in our lessons.  For each unit we study, my son creates a page.  But since he still needs a lot of help to do this, I am seeing the system from both the administrator, institution administrator, and the student perspective.

Sometimes it is easier to create a block of text using markup, then the block approach of Mahara, especially when most of our blocks are "Here is the title.  Here is paragraph explaining the title.  Here is the image / video to go with the title".  Right now, there is no way to indicate that they all belong to the same block.  This can affect printing out pages (try to keep the blocks together when printing out).

It would also be nice to have a block holder (minimum height -- which can be turned off after data is entered into the block).  I setup the page for my student (son) by entering in all of the headers.  My son (student) knows he is done with the unit / page when all of the blocks have data in them, and he can explain the data to somebody else (in our case, Dad).

Melissa

27 November 2013, 10:55

A separate Markdown block would be a great idea! It's unlikely we at Mahara HQ will be implementing that any time soon, but it's something that someone else could do as a third-party plugin.

It could incorporate the MediaWiki dual-mode markdown/wysiwyg editor: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/VisualEditor:Test?veaction=edit

On a separate note, could you expand on what you mean by a "block holder"?

Cheers,

Aaron

27 November 2013, 8:05

Hi Aaron,

I'm not so much in favor of markdown because I think it is a barrier for people to use esp. since they would still need to find their image URL. WordPress uses it for external links, e.g. to YouTube etc. so you don't need the full embed code, and that is OK because that's similar to our external media block, just inline. For this, we have the wishlist item for the HTML snippet.

For links to internal Mahara artefacts, I'd prefer a browser-type interface where users can simply select the item they want. Maybe not as complicated as the Moodle file picker though. ;-)

Cheers

Kristina

27 November 2013, 9:40

Moodle 2.6 files picker is much more user friendly comparing to what 2.0 was. Ok it still requires some "learning curve" but it is very modular and "quite" intuitive.