Quick Notes

For experienced OLab3 authors

Overview

For those who are quite experienced with OpenLabyrinth v3, here are a few quick notes to get you started so you can poke around in the OLab4 interface.

These notes will need to change as we improve the interface. Please make Comments/Edits/Suggestions to these documents as you find issues.

Basic Navigation: Player <--> Designer

The Player and the Designer are not very well integrated yet. In OLab4.6, this will be quite different because the two main components share more in the underlying frameworks. We are no longer using the Entrada framework, for example.

The Player is kinda the boss, controls user access etc. The Designer will be the kid sister, doing what it is told (and arguing frequently).

https://demo.olab.ca/player/ -- takes you to the Player. If you have the right permissions, this is where you would also perform maintenance and admin stuff like add other users etc.

https://demo.olab.ca/designer/ -- takes you to the Designer, where you can edit maps etc. There is not yet a nice clean link between the two.

The URL scheme is similar between the Player and the Designer. You can cheat and jump straight to the map that you want to play or edit by adding the map number to the URL.

https://demo.olab.ca/ -- takes you to a clunky default Apache page. Not a pretty sight. Will be changed soon.

Working with the Player

Things should be fairly similar to OLab3. There is a cleaner list of playable maps, with better search and descriptions. You can search by name or map number.

The map number in the URL works more or less as things did for OLab3.

Working with the Designer

There is a list of editable Maps. Again, you can search by map name or number.

As a Superuser, you will be able to open and edit any of the maps.

I’d prefer that you do not mess with the ones marked as “Demo… something” in the title as they are examples we are building as how-to’s etc.

If you are not a Superuser but just an Author, you will only have access to your own maps or to templates. If you are just a Learner, you will not be able to edit any maps. You will only be able to play certain maps.

Create a Map

You can create your own Maps – start with Create Manually, or Create from Template. The latter allows you to start with some easy starter maps. There are only a few templates so far.

The Designer has been simplified a lot. As many users always commented, the OLab3 authoring interface was really messy. It should now be somewhat cleaner. We have used a similar concept map design – add Links and Nodes as before.

You can add things like Questions and files or images using the Object Picker.

Changes are not auto-saved for each node. Use Ctrl-S as a quick key to save before you switch to another Node. But there is only one level of Save, not two like there were in OLab3.

Have a little poke around and give us feedback on what you find.