Text editors

Thanks for this new Atto plugin. I've already started making myself some of the more useful page templates similar to slide layouts used by Libre Office Impress and M$ Power Point so I can easily make "Slide Shows" in a Moodle Book resource. With the Book Appearance Custom Title check box marked the similarity to a slide is pretty good. With some of the Generico filters and HTML5 stuff, should be able to come very close to what you can do with a slide.

Due to the table limitations of the Atto editor, I am making the template in LO Writer, copy and pasting  into a book page, fine tuning the look, switching to HTML mode, then copy and pasting into a snippet. Works okay. If anyone comes up with something better, tell me...please.

I guess I should try making the templates with TinyMCE since it does "tables" better than Atto.

Generally, over my years of using Moodle, whenever I wanted to set up a Moodle page to have a particular look or layout using any of the Moodle editors, I have done it by using tables with various rows and columns with some cells merged to get the look I want. It was always a pain in the backside. However, using tables this way in snippets makes this VERY easy to do.

BUT, if you do any research, it is NOT recommended to use tables for layout like that as it make for some pretty complicated HTML. Instead, it is recommended to use all the new HTML5 stuff, such as flexboxes,etc. Unfortunately, I've discovered that the style  stuff that makes the HTML5 look right, gets ignored when used in a snippet as soon as you save the page you are creating. 

I've discovered four options. One - the style info has to be placed in the Custom CSS of the theme you are using. If you are like me, and let people pick the theme to use, then to keep things from breaking, the style info has to be added to EVERY theme. Not a good option as in my case, I currently have 20 themes installed.

Option Two - Snippet does contain a styles.css file. If the style info is placed there, then purge all caches, the styling takes effect in every theme. Also not really a good option as any page created with a snippet will break as soon as/if you upgrade the Snippet plugin.

Option three and four - Generico Filter templates and PoodLL Filter Widget templates both have a Custom CSS field setting that when used, makes the styles show up in any theme used. This makes all the new HTML5 stuff usable/doable.

Sooooo - I guess the point of this rambling discourse is - can you think of any way to make the CSS style stuff work in a Snippet?  Is it possible to add a Custom CSS field to each snippet or, probably better, as an optional spot on the Snippet settings page?

Hi Justin,

Many thanks for the plugin.  

I need to port a bunch of TinyMCE templates (which are each stored in separate HTML file) to Atto and looking to use your Snippets plugin. Is there a simple/quick way to move them over without cutting and pasting? Where are the snippets stored at the backend (i.e. could I drop them in that way)?

One final thing, in TinyMCE I can select the template from a dropdown list from within the Editor itself, but Snippets in Atto current seems to have the popup with a button for each snippet, this becomes a bit unwieldy with 30+ templates, any plans to add something like the dropdown?

Thanks again,

Alex

Hi Justin

Great plugin by-the-way, and thank you so much for all the hard work.

Just a general question, about the likely hood of you finding the time to update compatibility to 3.5 following it's release in few weeks. I know you've mentioned some improvements such as switching to a dropdown list instead of a popup and buttons (which I have mixed feelings about, see below). It would be great to see a few improve an for 3.5 comparability to be assured as it's the later LTS release, not sure I can do much to help other than send encouragement and perhaps a bit of info.

I'm in the process of implementing this plugin for our course builders, as a template toolkit.  One of the challenges I have is targeting it at staff without making it something that Students are going to start fiddling with, because it's purpose is unclear.

My initial thought was to customise the atto_snippet > 'chooseinsert' language string to add some guidance and perhaps a link to some more guidnance on how to get the best out of our templates.  It's a shame this string doesn't support html, so it could be styled and include a link.

So in short, I really like the popup as it could potentially allow me to include some descriptive text, so that users (especially students) know what it's for. I'm not a fan of the 'spider web' icon, not sure if there's a way to allow this to be customised via the config or a language string perhaps?

So if you do move to a drop-down it might be a limitation in my mind.... perhaps you could give it as an option and also make the atto_snippet > 'chooseinsert' string support html, to keep everyone happy