[Building Sakai] lesson builder: new functionality to let you do free format pages; should I expose it by default?

[Charles Hedrick]

One group wanted to be able to design pages in Lesson Builder that don't follow the simple list format that I use.

First, let me note that I've provided some ability to tailor the format. You can supply custom CSS for Lesson Builder pages, either site-wide or for specific pages. But this group wanted to do completely free-form designs.

The first idea was to add content to lesson builder as usual, then copy and paste the URLs in the list into CKeditor. Custom CSS would then hide the normal Lesson Builder output. I added some class labels to make that easy.

That sort of works. However it has two problems:
* In some situations the URLs depend upon the user's state.
* The CKeditor text block breaks when you copy the site.

Thus I added an extra widget on each line in the list: a special link designed to be copied and pasted. It is at the end of the link, in a contrasting box, so it doesn't look like part of the normal page content. It is a special pseudo-URL that looks like http://lessonbuilder.sakaiproject.ord/NNN where NNN is the item ID number. The Lesson Builder display code replaces those with the actual URLs, in javascript.

At the moment I've disabled this in the default CSS. I was concerned that this is a fairly unusual way to use Lesson Builder, and that people would find the extra links confusing. All you have to do is cancel a display:none in one of the CSS classes.

Should I expose this by default?

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This is really a less than ideal situation. I should have built Lesson Builder based on a general page editor, with each type of Lesson Builder content a widget that could be manipulated by the editor. I.e. a clone of Sakai 3. The manpower I had available just wasn't enough to do this. My apologies.