As promised at Linuxtag, I have rewritten the presentation system. Presentations and slides are now defined in XML files and the architecture of the thing is much cleaner and nicer. It should be much easier to adapt this thing to more people.
I'd appreciate a bit of help with it. The basic framework is in place but there are many areas where someone with more artistic sense than myself could really make a difference. You can see the current status of it here: http://pres.lerdorf.com (put your mouse cursor somewhere in the navbar and hit space to go to the next slide, backspace to go back) It really only works with Mozilla 1.0 with the flash5 plugin installed. Please don't email me and complain that it looks like crap on IE. I really don't care what it looks like on IE at this point. Code can be fetched from cvs.php.net in "pres2". If you are interested in helping out and don't already have enough karma to commit to it, let me know and I will set you up. The README file for it so far follows: Ever wondered what would happen if someone was crazy enough to combine XML, PHP, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Flash and ActionScript in one application? Well, here it is. The new and improved PHP presentation system. Brief walkthrough of how this all hangs together: config.php - User configurable paths and filenames flash.php - Flash widget rendering embedded from objects.php fonts/ - Font files help.php - Help file index.php - Prints list of available presentations objects.php - Top-level widget rendering presentations/ - Directory of presentation files show.php - Main slide display code slides/ - Directory of slide files XML_Presentation.php - XML parser for the presentation files XML_Slide.php - XML parser for the slide files When a user first enters the site index.php presents a list of presentations by walking through the presentations/ directory and parsing each *.xml file using the XML_Presentation XML parser. The filename of the presentation file without the extension becomes the id by which the presentation is known. This string is passed to show.php via PATH_INFO (eg. show.php/intro) Now we are in show.php. Here we first parse $PATH_INFO to figure out which presentation file to read. Open the presentation file and grab the list of slides. First slide is #0 internally. Will probably show it to the user as starting at #1. The presentation file itself looks like this: <presentation> <title>PHP - Scripting the Web</title> <event>OSCON</event> <location>San Diego</location> <date>July 22, 2002</date> <speaker>Rasmus</speaker> <navmode>flash</navmode> <slide>slides/slide1.xml</slide> <slide>slides/slide2.xml</slide> </presentation> That is, you start it with a <presentation> tag, and have at least a title tag inside. The others are optional. Then a series of <slide> tags where you put the relative filename of each slide. This particular presentation XML file ends up getting parsed into an array of objects that looks like this: Array ( [1] => _presentation Object ( [title] => PHP - Scripting the Web [navmode] => flash [event] => OSCON [location] => San Diego [date] => July 22, 2002 [speaker] => Rasmus [slides] => Array ( [0] => _pres_slide Object ( [filename] => slides/slide1.xml ) [1] => _pres_slide Object ( [filename] => slides/slide2.xml ) ) ) ) Technically you could put more than 1 presentation in the same file, but this isn't completely supported at this point. This presentation object gets stored in $pres which is a session variable. We will see why in a little bit. So to get at the title of the presentation you would use: $pres[1]->title And to get the filename of the first slides you would use: $pres[1]->slides[0]->filename The slide XML files start with a <slide> tag and needs a <title> tag as well. Then it can have any combination of the following tags: <blurb> Paragraph of text which can contain <title> and <text> <list> Bullet list which can contain <title> and <bullet> <image> Image which can contain <title> and <filename> <example> Example block which can contain <title>, <text> or <filename> See the example slides in the slides/ directory for more info. The default navbar is written in flash5 and is rendered from objects.php with an embed tag which embeds flash.php. Since the flash.php is fetched in a separate request, it gets the current slide data via the session data. It also makes use of $slideNum and $maxSlideNum to navigate through the slides. A unique quality of this navbar is that when the mouse cursor is over it, it takes full control of the keyboard allowing the space bar to be used to advance to the next slide and the backspace key to go back one. Once you move the mouse cursor out of the navbar area all keystrokes go to the browser. We need this so we can do interactive slides where we don't want the space and backspace keys to change the slide. Architecturally any widget, including the navbar can have multiple rendering methods. For someone without a flash plugin for their browser, they will be able to choose (or we might even be able to detect this) a non-flash navbar of some kind. Likewise for each component of the slide. So far I have focused on HTML rendering of the various pieces, but eventually I'd like to see plain text, flash, SVG, jpg, png, etc... rendering methods for each component. If you look in objects.php you will see that each widget type has a $mode property and that the display() method for each one looks something like this: function display() { $this->{$this->mode}(); } And then you can have html(), flash(), text(), svg(), jpg() methods for each one. Have a look at the TODO file for a list of things to start working on. If we all pitch in a bit we should all end up with cool-looking presentations through this very flexible system. -Rasmus -- PHP Development Mailing List <http://www.php.net/> To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
