Item1154: SlideShowPlugin formatting goofed by enhancements

I just upgraded to Foswiki 1.0.2 and notice a major change in the SlideShowPlugin

It was obviously not tested enough in a browser. Try looking at BeginnersStartHere and notice several formatting issues where text overlap, verbatim area, bullets, tables several things are goofed.

Each time someone sneaks in an enhancements silently to a patch release we end in the same situation again and again.

Will you ever learn? Follow the release process

-- KennethLavrsen - 26 Feb 2009

It is not so black and white. I have made fixes to pre-1.0 enhancements. And this appears to cause side effects, but not because of not testing.

It is not a bug in SlideShowPlugin, but in BeginnersStartHere (which I didn't think of to test as well).

The difference is that previously SSP set skin=slideshow, while now it uses cover=slideshow. That allows to use (and override) the skin's styling, instead of having to define styling all on its own.

So this Task should fix BeginnersStartHere.

-- ArthurClemens - 26 Feb 2009

Just checked a few of the presentations we have here at Motorola.

All goofed up in different ways.

This extensions gets rolled back to how it was before the enhancements.

Those enhancements need much more careful testing with actual presentations.

It cannot be right that upgrading from 1.0.0 to 1.0.2 means you have to reconstruct all your presentations and presentation templates.

We do not try to fix it in one day. We revert and then you guys can play the next two months with a new version for 1.1

-- KennethLavrsen - 26 Feb 2009

Reverted all SlideShowPlugin changes since 1.0.0 in the new Release01x00 branch.

The new code is till intact in trunk.

It is not correct that BeginnersStartHere is the fix in trunk.

For example when I view existing presentions done in old TWiki, with slideshow template from old TWiki, the resulting format no longer fits one screen. I see the header of the next slide if the current slide only contains a few bullets. The minute I view same presentation in the TWiki 4.3 all is fine.

Updates to this plugins should be compatible. If you do not want to do that - make a new plugin with a new name.

-- KennethLavrsen - 26 Feb 2009

I must say that working on this plugin is severely hampered by lack of specification, tests and examples. Please provide slideshow examples to test against.

-- ArthurClemens - 27 Feb 2009

I will try and provide a set of examples but I need time because they are all full of confidential material so I cannot just post them

-- KennethLavrsen - 27 Feb 2009

I have an example now.

The problem is that the new trunk version of the SlideShowPlugin is not compatible with existing slide show templates.

Compare these two URLs

• Fails: http://merlin.lavrsen.dk/trunk/bin/view/Myweb/SlideShowDemo
• Works: http://merlin.lavrsen.dk/foswiki10/bin/view/Myweb/SlideShowDemo

The most obvious problem is that in trunk the old (perfectly working in 1.0 and T4.X and Cairo) presentations made on templates that were designed some years ago, do not have proper page separation.

I have also had problems with styling.

The line spacing is too small in trunk. Bullets also have too little line spacing.

There are strange artifacts on the left side in IE at least. And allignment is a bit so so.

For the new SlideShowPlugin to be able to replace the old, it needs to be reasonably compatible with existing templates. They may not have to look exactly like the old. But they have to work. Line spacings, the problem with the slide separation and the artifacts - that needs to get fixed.

-- KennethLavrsen - 16 Jun 2009

These display problems have nothing to do with SlideShowPlugin itself. The difference is that the old version used no skin, so used the default templates. The new version uses the current skin (pattern on your site).

Because you are using a custom template, not the one provided by the plugin, you won't benefit of the new styles, so it is 100% pattern skin style. And it looks like the skin is not prepared for big font sizes.

So I will try to improve pattern on that front.

-- ArthurClemens - 16 Jun 2009

Should largely be fixed. The only thing that does not work is to make each slide at least 100% browser window high. I may need javascript for such an enhancement.

-- ArthurClemens - 17 Jun 2009

Reopening

I must have been sleeping when I closed this.

The height of the page is not the only problem. It is also the lack of whitespace after each slide so when you present slide 2 you see top of slide 3 also.

There are also problems with left margin that should not be there.

And the default presentation has no styling at all. There is no nice header with logo. There is nothing.

This is a plugin that has business presentations as the target audience. They like to have a nice header with a background and a company logo and a nice footer with the copy rights etc. That is totally lost in the oversimplification that was done.

I am restoring as much of the old as I can and I am not a CSS expert so the only way I can do it this weekend where I want to release the beta 1 is by restoring the old solutions.

I do not care how code-wise ugly they were. They worked!

-- KennethLavrsen - 12 Sep 2010

Don't worry, I won't work on this plugin any longer. Because really there is no point without specifications or examples. Now suddenly you have a requirement to show a logo on the pages.

-- ArthurClemens - 12 Sep 2010

The original plugin had a well working example. I do not understand what the problem is. The changes made to the plugin in 1.1 goofed almost everything. The page height. The space to the next slide. The default layout. All you have to do is look at the old presentation example in a browser to get an idea what the plugin was doing, and doing very well.

The plugin always had a default design with a header with one background colour, the topic content with another, and a footer with background as well. And there was a logo in the header.

When you see business presentations in Powerpoint this is exactly like 90% of them look like.

You create a slide master in Powerpoint with your company logo and some layout. And each presentation then adds content. Many companies even make a corporate standard powerpoint template to be used for all external presentations to customers.

The typical Powerpoint slide master is a header with background bar. A content area. And footer usually with some small legal print.

The old default supported and inspired how to do this.

The one I just reverted had nothing. It was totally naked and did not in any way show someone new to Foswiki what the plugin can do.

When you see a good template with logo, headline, etc you know that you can modify it to your local need changing the colours and the logo. But when you show nothing, how will any one know what you can do?

-- KennethLavrsen - 12 Sep 2010

On IRC we discussed the issue. The problem was that Kenneth looked at the plugin when we had a bug with CSS inclusion, so logical that it did not look right.

I have agreed to continue on this. After some work on the code I have come to the conclusion that it would be much better to make use of TABPANE provided by JQueryPlugin. It would make it possible to use the window full width and height without html hacks.

It might be that the required changes are not within the code freeze, we should look at the changes in trunk first.

Continued in Item9705.

-- ArthurClemens - 17 Sep 2010