Monday, September 12, 2005

Using ExpressionEngine to generate Presentations

Eric Meyer has written and described a ‘.... slide show format based entirely on XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript.’ With this system it is possible create slide shows which look a little bit like PowerPoint but are in fact, simply one XHTML page.

I came across this presentation technique (known as S5) at a recent conference where some presentation where given in this way. When I exploreed Eric Meyer’s web page and downloaded the blank templates, it occurred to me that it may be possible to use ExpressionEngine to create the content for the slides and then deliver the presentation with this technique.

I have now succeeded in this and I do have an example of a presentation using this method. If you are interested to find out my approach to this and how things have worked out then read on. For a view of the entry system then click over the small image here.

furthermore...

I have just given this presentation at the Book Conference and I hope this makes sense in your browser.

Move down to the bottom right and you should be able to navigate to a named slide. Click on the Ø symbol and the styles are stripped away revealing the basic page. Yes, this presentation is one page!

I have thought about different strategies to get this to utilise n ExpressionEngine template and data entry system and right now this uses one template and a one place to enter all the data for (up to) 10 slides. This number could be extended. It just means building a rather large set of Custom Fields. And this is basically the problem:

I have a large set of Custom Fields that allows for the entry of the title of the talk, with some further text for the first slide, a date of the talk, the place and some text that will only print. Then for each slide, I have a title and then a field for entry of the bullet points. Now, because I am using tinyMCE to give more control over the text input, I can easily add bullet points and even nested bullet points. If you don't use this type of wysiwyg tool, then you will need to add the HTML yourself (or copy / paste from another tool / editor).

This has worked for me in this experiment but I wonder if another approach would work? Rather than enter the information for the presentation, we could have a section that uses a custom field set that adds a slide at a time. The field set would have a title (of the slide) then a set of (say) 10 bullet points (using 10 text entry fields). There would need to be a set of categories that represent the tilte of the presentation, so that the template could pull the slides out from the correct set of slides. The process for the author would be to create a new category (presentation title) for each presentation.

I am thinking about this but for the moment it seems that the first solution works well enough.