Some instructions for using the site

Here are some short notes on how to use the site. Sooner or later this
will grow into a real manual, so if you find the instructions unclear,
please send me your comments.


Navigation

I believe the site should not be too hard to navigate for you. A lot of
work has been put into reducing the interface and reduce the clutter
to a minimum. 

The main structure of the interface is that the tabs on your upper left
are "site-general" options, i.e. those tabs get you to content which
belongs to the site as a whole. Right now, there are only three tabs:
"Members", which provides a means to navigate to the pages of other users;
"Reports", which lists all the reports that have been published (n.b. not
simply created. See below for description of editing workflow); "Tools",
where researchers can add ToonTalk objects to be used by the kids.

On your upper right hand, you have the links which belong to your actions
as an individual user: "My Home" which takes you to your personal home
page; "My Reports" which lists the reports you have created; "My Blab"
where you can add short comments about your work; "Undo" which provides an
interface where you can undo all your recent actions; and finally "Log
out" which should be obvious.

On your left hand side, you have two boxes: "Navigation" and "Interface".
The "Navigation" box contains a representation of your local context
depending on where you are in the site. It can help you navigate between
content items which are close to each other. The "Interface" box contains
the link "Advanced" which can be clicked whenever you visit some content
that you own. Clicking "Advanced" takes you to a folder view of the local
content depending on where you are standing. The advanced view can be used
for maintenance tasks such as renaming, moving or deleting objects. This
view should rarely be needed, and in fact I plan on making it less
prominent once I have figured out the best place to put it.

One last non-obvious part of the general interface is that you find your
personal preferences if you click on "My Home" and then select the tab
"Preferences". Currently there's a bug which makes the "Preferences" tab
show up even when you visit the home page of other users. This should not
be the case, of course.


Reports

The main application of the site is naturally the possibility to add
reports. To add a report, click the "My Reports" link, then hit the button
"Add a Report". You are taken to a screen where you can fill in a title
and a short description of your report (the description is meant to be
used as a very short hint of what the report is about, one or two
sentences long). Hit the "Create" button, and you're taken to the WYSIWYG
editor. Most of what the buttons can do for you in the editor should be
obvious, but try them all!

Below the WYSIWYG editor, you find a field called "Insert Object". If you
hit the "Browse" button, you get a file chooser, where you can select a
file from your local file system. The field can be used to insert any type
of file into your report, but more specifically, it knows how to handle
certain interesting types of content:

 1. An image. If you select an image file, the image will be inserted
    into your report.
 2. A ToonTalk object. If you select a ToonTalk object (ending with .tt),
    the object will be added to the site, and an image representing the
    object will be inserted into the report.
 3. A ToonTalk applet. If you select a zip-file which contains an applet
    created with ToonTalk, the applet will be inserted into the report.
 4. Other content. Any other file (Word files, Excel files etc) that you
    select will be added to the site, and a text link to it will be
    inserted into the report.

Once you've selected a file, hit the "Save" button, and you will be taken
to the "View" tab of your report. Here you can see what it will look like
to others. You can now keep switching between the "Edit" and "View" tabs
to keep improving your report. One thing you'll notice if you go back and
edit a report when you have added a file, is that you can drag-and-drop
the links and images of these files within the WYSIWYG editor, to position
them where you want them in your report.

The third part of your report interface is the "State" tab. This is where
you go when you think that your report is good enough to be published.
Once you've published your report, it will show up under the general
"Reports" tab of the site. A published report can no longer be edited, but
if you want to edit it again, you go the "State" tab, and choose
to "Retract" the report. Now you can edit it again, and once you're done, go
to the "State" tab again and "Publish" the report.


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