We are working on an open source tool, WalkHub, that enables a community to collaborate wiki style on GuidedTours (or Walkthroughs, that's what we call them).
-Recording a tour could become a matter of clicking a record button; -Editing a tour, a matter of clicking the edit button in the tour and making a change. -The tool automatically generates screenshots and an embeddable widget that you can use for example to show off new functionality on a blog
I heard about the GuidedTours project from Erik Möller at FOSDEM and I was wondering if the team that is working on it would be interested in our project.
This is a demo movie of our first recorder: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZWt4qfxU0U the section where I record a Walkthrough on Wikipedia: http://youtu.be/0ZWt4qfxU0U?t=2m34s
This is a Walkthrough we recorded on Wikipedia: http://walkhub.net/content/how-donate-wikipedia
Cheers, Kristof
I can't speak for the Wikimedia tech folks, but as someone who's done some creation of on-wiki tours I'll say...
Wow, this is really cool! This is exactly the kind of thing we need to really open up the creation of Guided Tours to the community. I'm imagining this as MediaWiki gadget, such that a user can enable it, record a walkthrough on the wiki itself, and then at the end, have the opportunity to save the resulting walkthrough code on a wiki page. Is that feasible, or is the WalkHub documentation format too far away from the MediaWiki extension implementation of GuidedTours? Integrating it into Wikipedia might be a great project for someone to tackle as an Individual Engagement Grant project.[1]
Thanks, Kristof! I read in YouTube comments that you're planning another crowdfunding campaign for this. I look forward to pitching in!
[1] = http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG
-Sage
On Tue, May 27, 2014 at 6:11 PM, Kristof Van Tomme kristof@pronovix.com wrote:
We are working on an open source tool, WalkHub, that enables a community to collaborate wiki style on GuidedTours (or Walkthroughs, that's what we call them).
-Recording a tour could become a matter of clicking a record button; -Editing a tour, a matter of clicking the edit button in the tour and making a change. -The tool automatically generates screenshots and an embeddable widget that you can use for example to show off new functionality on a blog
I heard about the GuidedTours project from Erik Möller at FOSDEM and I was wondering if the team that is working on it would be interested in our project.
This is a demo movie of our first recorder: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZWt4qfxU0U the section where I record a Walkthrough on Wikipedia: http://youtu.be/0ZWt4qfxU0U?t=2m34s
This is a Walkthrough we recorded on Wikipedia: http://walkhub.net/content/how-donate-wikipedia
Cheers, Kristof
EE mailing list EE@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/ee
On 05/27/2014 06:11 PM, Kristof Van Tomme wrote:
We are working on an open source tool, WalkHub, that enables a community to collaborate wiki style on GuidedTours (or Walkthroughs, that's what we call them).
This is a really cool tool, and I think it will be an inspiration.
-Recording a tour could become a matter of clicking a record button;
We have wanted to allow generating/recording tours for a while (https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=44597). It's a tricky problem, and using Selenium as an intermediary is an interesting solution, even though it requires installing a browser extension.
-The tool automatically generates screenshots and an embeddable widget that you can use for example to show off new functionality on a blog
Yeah, that's cool, although we do not have any way such things can be embedded on wiki currently (we could certainly look at adding something similar to GuidedTour). Do you use a headless browser like PhantomJS for the screenshots?
I heard about the GuidedTours project from Erik Möller at FOSDEM and I was wondering if the team that is working on it would be interested in our project.
To be honest, I'm not sure right now if/how it can fit into our plans.
Of course right now we have a different architecture and tour format (MediaWiki instead of Drupal, JavaScript API-based tours instead of Selenium-based ones).
Also, we have some things that may or may not have equivalents in WalkHub/Selenium. For example, we can listen for a JavaScript hook/event fired by part of our codebase to know when the tour is ready to proceed. For example, the VisualEditor can tell us if the page is now save-able, so we know whether to point to the save button, regardless of how the page became save-able (typing, bolding some text with the toolbar, etc.).
This is a Walkthrough we recorded on Wikipedia: http://walkhub.net/content/how-donate-wikipedia
It looks like when playing these the proxy is required. Is that correct?
Thanks,
Matt Flaschen
Hey there Kristof!
Thanks for sharing info about WalkHub. (For context: Matt is the lead developer on the GuidedTour extension, and I'm the product manager on our Growth team, which has been its heaviest user.)
I tried the donation tour you made, and it's pretty cool. It's interesting how it feels a bit like an interactive video.
On Wed, May 28, 2014 at 7:31 PM, Matthew Flaschen mflaschen@wikimedia.orgwrote:
To be honest, I'm not sure right now if/how it can fit into our plans.
Of course right now we have a different architecture and tour format (MediaWiki instead of Drupal, JavaScript API-based tours instead of Selenium-based ones).
Also, we have some things that may or may not have equivalents in WalkHub/Selenium. For example, we can listen for a JavaScript hook/event fired by part of our codebase to know when the tour is ready to proceed. For example, the VisualEditor can tell us if the page is now save-able, so we know whether to point to the save button, regardless of how the page became save-able (typing, bolding some text with the toolbar, etc.).
Matt's summary is about right.
It would be huge if we could enable Wikimedians to create tours just by walking through an interface as they normally would, and it'd be interesting to hear more about how to you accomplish this. Right now the code for creating tours is really simplified... but it's still writing JavaScript. That's a big barrier.
I think a cool first step might just be sharing some feedback between the projects about lessons learned, enhancement ideas, etc. Maybe I could give you a list of tours we're running to try, and we could do the same for you? I already noticed a few things I like about WalkHub, and a few things GuidedTour does that it doesn't seem to yet.
Thanks for reaching out to us on the list. :)