SlideNavPlugin

A plugin for use in navigating arbitrary collections of slides. Works nicely together with the TWiki:Plugins.SlidePlugin.

Although TWiki is good at presenting hierarchical information I needed a way to store a collection of slides, used in internal training, and to navigate those slides in arbitrary ways. I didn't want to have to mark each slide, as has been done before, and I wanted slides to be able to be used in more than one presentation. The SlideNav plugin aims to help with this.

To use this plugin you should also be using the SlidePlugin which is stored and documented separately.

Once you have installed the plugin you create an index topic which contains a bulleted set of other topics which are the slides. Which presentation a user is reading at any time is controlled through a CGI Query variable, named presentation. For example, if I were to be reading a presentation named codespelunking that would looke like:

...wiki/bin/view/Sandbox/CodeSpelunking?presentation=CodeSpelunking

In order to make starting a presentation easier a link with a similar target should be placed into the index topic.

Syntax Rules

• Each slide topic must be places in its own bullet:

   * SlideTopicOne
   * SlideTopicTwo

Examples

Plugin Settings

Plugin settings are stored as preferences variables. To reference a plugin setting write %<plugin>_<setting>%, i.e. %SLIDENAVPLUGIN_SHORTDESCRIPTION%

• One line description, is shown in the TextFormattingRules topic:
  • Set SHORTDESCRIPTION = A slide navigator

• Debug plugin: (See output in data/debug.txt)
  • Set DEBUG = 0

Plugin Installation Instructions

Note: You do not need to install anything on the browser to use this plugin. The following instructions are for the administrator who installs the plugin on the server where TWiki is running.

• Download the ZIP file from the Plugin web (see below)
• Unzip SlideNavPlugin.zip in your twiki installation directory. Content:

  File:	Description:
  data/TWiki/SlideNavPlugin.txt	Plugin topic
  data/TWiki/SlideNavPlugin.txt,v	Plugin topic repository
  lib/TWiki/Plugins/SlideNavPlugin.pm	Plugin Perl module

• IMPORTANT: In order to see the navigation bar you must update templates/view.pattern.tmpl to contain the lines:

<div class="patternTopic">%TEXT%
%SLIDENAVBAR%
#TopicEnd

• Test if the installation was successful:
  • You're on your own here...

Benchmarking

./pluginbenchmark SlideNavPlugin Sandbox.BecomingParanoid
TWiki Plugin benchmark utility, version 11 Nov 2004. (Time::HiRes is installed and used)
Measuring, please be patient...
Topic:                          Without:  With:     Percent:
------------------------------  --------  --------  --------
TWiki.SlideNavPlugin               0.042     0.041      101%
Sandbox.BecomingParanoid           0.041     0.042       98%

Plugin Info

Plugin Author:	TWiki:Main.GeorgeNevilleNeil
Plugin Version:	16 Jan 2006 (V1.000)
Change History:
16 Jan 2006:	Initial version
TWiki Dependency:	$TWiki::Plugins::VERSION 1.1
CPAN Dependencies:	none
Other Dependencies:	none
Perl Version:	5.005
License:	GPL (GNU General Public License)
Benchmarks:	GoodStyle nn%, FormattedSearch nn%, SlideNavPlugin nn%
Plugin Home:	http://TWiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Plugins/SlideNavPlugin
Feedback:	http://TWiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Plugins/SlideNavPluginDev
Appraisal:	http://TWiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Plugins/SlideNavPluginAppraisal

Related Topics: TWikiPreferences, TWikiPlugins

-- TWiki:Main.GeorgeNevilleNeil - 16 Jan 2006