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Simplify Interaction Between Page Editor and Creation of Objects in Container Objects

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After a first workshop this Freature Request was split up into four different ones:

Please find the minutes of the workshop in the following document

Minutes of the Workshop of July 7th 2019

1 Initial Problem

Our experience points to a difficulty of ILIAS users to understand the workflow to combine ILIAS Objects and the Page Editor in Container Objects. To do this it is currently necessary to:

  1. Create the necessary elements
  2. Mostly create Item Lists and add the Objects to the Item List
  3. Write the surrounding text in the Customize Page underworld and add the Item Lists as a Page Elements in the corresponding places.
If one forgets to create an object, one has to leave the Editor, create the object, add it to the Item List (that now shows up in the corresponding place on the page) alternatively you can add it inside the Content View of the Item List, but this is also not much easier to understand. If one wants to sort the Objects in the Item List one needs to go to the corresponding settings in the surrounding Object. If one wants to add text inside the Item Group, ...well there it becomes adventurous:
  • Sometimes it is enough to just create an accordeon with a text inside and then add the Item Group while hiding its title. Now you will need to explain to the lecturer how to administer the resulting construct and this is in my experience prone to failure.
  • Alternatively you will split the Items up into seperate Item Groups and then again hide their title and write the the text in between.

2 Conceptual Summary

The aim of this Feature Request is to make life easier for an user to mix text and objects when setting up a course/lesson, so that the result reflects her didactic plan.

For this we propose to simplify this process of combining ILIAS Objects and Elements coming from the page editor. This is no easy task though as there needs to be an intuitive interaction of two separate concepts: the page editor and the List views.

During a workshop it was decided to split this Feature Request into four different requests concerning the two components of ILIAS that need to work together well to make the interaction between the ILIAS Page Editor and ILIAS Items/Objects simple(r):

Here are a few possible ways to explore:

  • We create a setting in the newly created "Content Page"-Object so that its content will directly be rendered in the container object. There would be two different ways of generating text in a container object: through the "Customize Page"-Feature and through the "Content Page"-Object. To avoid this it might be usefull to abandon the "Customize Page"-Feature for container objects, thus only leaving the one option to create content.
  • We allow to create ILIAS objects directly in the Page Editor. In this scenario we would need to make sure that we don't jump randomly between the page editor and the object view. One solution could be to change the "Customize Page"-Subtab into a view like the "View"-View or the "Sorting"-View and to make it sticky in the same way, i.e. if you move from one container object to another the "Page"-view stays selected.
  • A minimal solution, but far less intuitive, would be to simply allow for ILIAS Objects to be added in the Page Editor without needing to be put in an Item List. There would still need to be a two step process: create the object -> add the object.

3 User Interface Modifications

3.1 List of Affected Views

{Please list all views (screens) of ILIAS that should be modified, newly introduced or removed.}

3.2 User Interface Details

{For each of these views please list all user interface elements that should be modified, added or removed. Please provide the textual appearance of the UI elements and their interactive behaviour.}

3.3 New User Interface Concepts

{If the proposal introduces any completely new user interface elements, you might consult UI Kitchen Sink in order to find the necessary information to propose new UI-Concepts. Note that any maintainer might gladly assist you with this.}

4 Technical Information

{The maintainer has to provide necessary technical information, e.g. dependencies on other ILIAS components, necessary modifications in general services/architecture, potential security or performance issues.}

5 Contact

6 Funding

If you are interest in funding this feature, please add your name and institution to this list.

  • …

7 Discussion

Jackisch, Ingo [jackisch] 2019-05-03: The first way to tackle this topic woulg give us anoter advantage: Authors who are used to create courses in moodle would have a simple way to transform their ways to create courses to ILIAS . IMHO the concepts of a centralized page contetd (as containers offer now) and the rendering of page content Objects in Containers can co-exist, so that both ways of creating courses can be uses by authors depending on their personal preferences. Some way in the future we still can consider to transform the main page into a page opject which is positined on top of a container, if we have to reduce code complexity in ILIAS.

8 Implementation

{The maintainer has to give a description of the final implementation and add screenshots if possible.}

Test Cases

Test cases completed at {date} by {user}

  • {Test case number linked to Testrail} : {test case title}

Approval

Approved at {date} by {user}.

Last edited: 23. Jun 2021, 16:38, Tödt, Alexandra [atoedt]