One useful thing you can add to your profile page, or any View, is a text box. These are extremely useful for giving meaning to your web page. You can use the text box to put in descriptions or snippets of information that help structure your View in a more logical way.
In the next Time for action section we look at how exactly you add a text box to your profile page. Along the way, you will encounter for the fi rst ti me Mahara’s drag-and-drop user interface for adding items to Views, which is is very exciting! One of the things that make Mahara stand out is its flexible framework for creating web pages. It is extremely intuitive as you will see, and reflects in some ways how you would create a poster display—taking bits of information such as text and pictures, moving them around until you are happy with their location and then sticking them in place. Of course, the advantage is that, with Mahara, they aren’t stuck down forever with glue and can be repositioned whenever you like.
Let’s add a text box to our profile View.
Can’t drag and drop in Internet Explorer 6.
The functionality allowing us to drag blocks around the page when we are editing a Mahara View is enabled by JavaScript. Most modern browsers support JavaScript as default, including Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer 7 and 8. Unfortunately, many people are still running Internet Explorer 6 and Mahara’s drag-and-drop facility won’t work in this browser because of problems (or bugs) it has with layout that newer browsers don’t. You can still use IE 6 without the drag and drop feature, and use the radio buttons instead, but we recommend you to upgrade your Internet Explorer browser or (even better) download an open source browser such as Mozilla’s Firefox: www.mozilla.com/firefox/.
You just added a text box to your profile page.
A section on your View is called a block, and you’ve just learned how to add a new text box by clicking and dragging it onto your profile page. Blocks are what Mahara uses to personalize your profile page and your Views. You can add and delete blocks, and move them around. There are actually quite a variety of blocks, and the Mahara developers are keen to keep adding to the list. We have started here with a basic text box, as it’s probably the one you will use most frequently.
One of the things you probably noticed when adding text to your text box was that you have a number of editing options available. Janet would like to make her text look more interesting, so let’s revisit our text box and look at what these options do.
You will probably find that you have already used most of the options in the text editor when working in word processing programs. Let’s have a quick look at some of the most commonly used options.
Icons | Function |
| These icons can be used to make your characters bold, italicized, or underlined
|
| Align your text to the left, to the center, to the right or justify your text into a square, newspaper-style layout.
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| Add bullets or numbers to your lists of text.
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| To toggle your page into HTML mode.
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| Add a hyperlink to your text.
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| Break an existing hyperlink.
|
Now let’s try formatting some of the text you have just entered.
You just edited a text box by adding a hyperlink.
In the last section, we showed you that HTML editing is one of the options in the text editor. Web developers have traditionally used HTML code to write their web pages. It will be useful for regular Mahara users to learn a bit of basic HTML in order to gain more control over their Mahara View pages.
The World Wide Web Consortium offers free, beginner-level HTML tutorials at http://www.w3schools.com/html/.
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