Difference between revisions of "S5SlideShow"

Revision as of 16:30, 1 November 2011

S⁵ or simply S5 is a cross-browser slide-show system using pure HTML and JavaScript. Its name is derived from Simple Standards-based Slide Show System — 5 times «S», or simply S⁵.

S5SlideShow is a MediaWiki extension allowing simple, fast and convenient creation of slide shows using S5 in the context of MediaWiki and Wiki pages.

The source code lives in Google Code:

• …And is mirrored to our SVN to allow partly checkout: http://wiki.4intra.net/svn/mediawiki4intranet/extensions/S5SlideShow/
• Google code link to Mercurial repository: http://code.google.com/p/mediawiki4intranet/source/browse?r=mw4i-ext#hg%2Fextensions%2FS5SlideShow
• (TBZ2-archived version from 2011-11-01): http://mediawiki4intranet.googlecode.com/files/S5SlideShow-2011-11-01.tar.bz2

Extension page on mediawiki.org: Extension:S5SlideShow.

Slide show example (russian language): User:StasFomin/VideoKnowHow.

Usage

S5SlideShow gives a simple, convenient and fast method for creating slide shows from plaintext. Of course, it supports the full range of MediaWiki features such as Flash video, Mindmaps, code highlighting and etc.

You can turn any wiki page into a slide show. To do so, put there a block (slide show definition) with following content:

<slideshow attribute="value" [attribute="value" ...]>
;attribute: Value
[;attribute: Value ...]
</slideshow>

I.e. attributes may be specified either as XML-like <slide> tag attributes, or as definition list items inside it. There are the following attributes:

After adding the slide show definition, you only need to click the skin preview image emerged in the place of the definition in article view. Then, if you’re in Opera, click F11, and if you’re in Firefox or Chrome, the presentation will begin itself.

So, slides are specified as article sections with «headingmark» in their titles. You can also specify slides using <slides> tag. Slides specified like this are shown as «live thumbnails» (html DIVs with scaled content). This mode is considered experimental and should not be used for the whole presentations, as the resulting presentation will be much less readable. You should use it only for generating slides for some «floating illustrations»:

<slides float="right" width="300">
[[File:Image.jpg]]
</slides>

Skins

There are 6 different skins available:

custis	default	blue

flower	yatil	pixel

Creating your own skins

With the S5SlideShow extension you can easily create your own S5 skins, using only wiki-page editing. S5 skin is simply a file with CSS styles for specific HTML elements. To be correct, there are several CSS’s, but most of the time you need only one «pretty.css» to change how the slide show looks.

CSS styles can be put on Wiki pages with names like MediaWiki:S5/custis/pretty.css, where custis is the skin name (replace with yours), and pretty.css is the CSS stylesheet name. Most of the time you only need to edit pretty.css, but if you’ll need to change other builtin styles — you can also change core.css, base.css and framing.css. Builtin S5 skins can be changed in the same manner — the wiki page content overrides files from the extension distribution.

CSS styles could obviously use some images, and here, all is also simple — if you want to use your own image in the style, just upload it to MediaWiki (using only latin letters, numbers and '.', '-', and '_' characters in file name), and add it your CSS as following: url(filename.png). When S5SlideShow will generate CSS for your skin, this construction will be replaced with a correct path to your image.

After that, passing your skin name as <slide style=""> will work in all presentations.

Example style links — open them despite of they’re red (article does not exist), they’ll show you the default CSS stylesheets of blue skin:

• MediaWiki:S5/blue/core.css
• MediaWiki:S5/blue/base.css
• MediaWiki:S5/blue/framing.css
• MediaWiki:S5/blue/pretty.css

You can use custis’s pretty.css as a base for your own skin — just replace the logo :)

You can also upload the preview image for your newly created skin — use filenames like Media:S5-devconf-preview.png (where «devconf» is the skin name). It will be scaled to ~200px automatically.

Remarks

Duality

There are several features that make S5 in combination with MediaWiki a unique technology — firstly, slide shows are created very simply, and secondly, there is no more need to maintain two versions of presentation «with» and «without» remarks — «for slide show» and «for home reading». For «home reading» the normal article view mode can be used, because you can make its part non-mapped to slides. Moreover, such slide shows allow simple collaborative work, version control and other normal Wiki features.

Opera

As it was already mentioned, you need to press F11 to go into slideshow and fullscreen mode in Opera browser. It’s not required in Firefox and Chrome.

Control panel

If you move the mouse cursor over the lower-right corner of the slide show, you can see a simple slide show control panel.

Skin selection

Any slide show can be opened using any available skin without changing its definition — you only need to add &s5skin=NAME to slide show URL (where NAME is the skin name).

WISYWIM

In MediaWiki4Intranet, you can use «live auto-preview» to perform «almost WISYWIM» (What You See Is What You Mean) mode editing. To do so you need to check the «slides» checkbox below the edit area, select desired auto-refresh time (30 seconds by default) and click «Auto-preview» (FIXME checkboxes may be not translated from russian by now). A new browser tab or window will be opened, and you can place it at the right side of edit window or, for example, on the second display. It will contain the slideshow you are editing, and position within it (slide #) will be preserved, and it will refresh each XX seconds (30 by default).

Incremental (step-by-step) display

There are 3 ways to do it.
First: If the slide is marked with «incremental» mark (incmark attribute) all lists — ordered and unordered ones — will be displayed item-by-item.
Second: On any slide, the contents of any element with CSS class="anim" will be shown item-by-item (for example <div class="anim"><div>i.1</div><div>i.2</div></div> and etc).
Third: a single element can be marked with class="incremental" and it will become an «additional step» for display.

Step-by-step «animations»

If you mark some element (most commonly <div>) with class="anim over", then the contents of this element will be shown not just step-by-step, but each next subelement will replace the previous one. You can use it for effects like this: animation example from S5 author (works only in Firefox/Chrome, because there is an old S5 version). This also isn’t a basic S5 ability and also is our feature.

Link to slide

If you want to make a link to specific slide, add the #slideN anchor to slide show URL. N is slide number, beginning with 0 which is the title slide. Also, our S5 version preserves the position (current slide number) on page reload (F5, Ctrl-R). And this is also our feature :)

Example

Slide show definition example (can be used as a stub for copy-paste):

<slide style="custis" headingmark="Slide:" incmark="(step)" scaled="true">
;author: Presentation Author
;title: Multithreading in Java (beginning)
;subtitle: Multithreading in Java (beginning)
;subfooter: {{date}}
</slide>

Installation

Installation is very simple. All you need is to get the code into /extensions/S5SlideShow subdirectory (you can’t use other path as it’s hardcoded by now) and add a line to LocalSettings.php:

require_once "$IP/extensions/S5SlideShow/S5SlideShow.php";

Also you can specify some configuration, but this is not required:

// headingmark attribute default value
$egS5SlideHeadingMark = '';
// incmark attribute default value
$egS5SlideIncMark = '\(step\)';
// hack into parser for better image quality in presentations
$egS5BrowserScaleHack = true;

Changes

• 2011-11-01: Removed all warnings under E_STRICT. Removed register_globals vulnerabilities. Allow centered slides with titles (centermark).
• 2011-09-19: Parser hack for better image quality in presentations ($egS5BrowserScaleHack). Images inserted with a specified width will be scaled by browser instead of MediaWiki software.
• 2011-09-12: Fix SVG scaling errors.
• 2011-06-17: Allow custom style previews to be stored as uploaded files.
• 2011-06-15: «noslide» and «slideonly» CSS classes to allow hiding/showing certain elements.
• 2011-06-10: Fix non-working «incmark» error.
• 2011-06-06: Follow redirects in presentation mode.
• 2011-05-29: Refactoring — totally new article parsing method, <slide> is renamed to <slideshow>, much better content scaler (+images +SVG +CSS3), always scales content relatively to the text. Also new optional experimental method for specifying slides — <slides> tag, allows «live thumbnails» mode when viewing article. «pagebreak» option is removed.
• 2011-05-10: Allow to create own skins using Wiki pages.

Open issue(s)

• FIXME remove hardcode extensions/S5SlideShow/
• TODO cache generated stylesheets and flush the cache after saving style articles
• TODO remove support for loading text from session object and replace it by support for save-staying-in-edit-mode extension