OERu/Planning/Technology working group/2014-09-05

Agenda

1. MW upgrade
   • Colour of external links (consistency across browsers)
   • Pedagogical templates
     • Negative space issue
     • Template data
   • Subpages in VE
2. Registration widget (course snapshot)

Notes

1. Present: Wayne Mackintosh, Jim Tittsler
2. Anchor text is colored based on browser visit history.
3. The WikiEducator pedagogical templates need attention. A couple of solutions should probably be approached in parallel:
   1. The existing templates should be updated to
      • not have a negative top margin
      • be built on DIVs and not TABLEs
      • be consistent in their layout (there are at least two variants at present)
      • rely on global CSS rather than embedded STYLEs
   2. A new pair of templates can be built that can be thought of as "wrapping" the iDevice content. An iDevice_start template would "open" an iDevice, which would then render all following wikitext up to the corresponding iDevice_end template. (iDevice_open and iDevice_close?) This technique would allow the use of the new VisualEditor to author the content contained within the template. The naming convention would facilitate picking the template names in the autocompletion list. The start template would require an argument of type (Activity, Objectives, Reading, etc.) and optional arguments of title (to override the default, which is the type) and theme (which modifies the icon and rendering).
4. The course registration widget needs to be rewritten to use the new Mediawiki options API rather than the obsolete WEoptions extension. At the same time, it would be good to extend it to handle WikiEducator account creation and additional authentication methods including OpenID and OAuth2.
   • The old widget has been updated for the options API. No new features have been added. --Jim Tittsler (talk) 07:59, 8 September 2014 (UTC)
5. The OERu Community Source initiative is not finding any interested developers either within the partner institutions or the wider community.
6. Jim fixed the pagination on the OERu blog. (And was amused that nobody had noticed the problem.)