uploading a linked HTML 'site' to a Fronter 'room'

[morphy_richards]

Hi,

I'm head of ICT at a school in London. I've currently got a number of 'project briefs' for my students which are hosted on my schools intranet.

 

Our network admin is going to be taken over by a private company next year and one of the 'improvements' they are going to make is to not support an intranet! (I dont think there is anything I can do about this)

 

I've been considering various methods of hosting our projects, from renting cheap basic web server space somewhere on the internet (which would be difficult to then make private) to simply putting the web sites onto Fronter (which I thought should be a simple solution, just upload the web site folder to a 'room') However this doesnt work. None of the links work and the page doesnt display correctly.

 

I've been fiddling around trying to make the web sites scorm compliant but havent managed to get my definitions correct. Is there a very easy way of converting a simple collection of linked html pages in a directory to SCORM so they work in Fronter? (without using the dreamweaver add on, as I'm having enough problems with installed software which will and will not be supported by this private company as it is) I've also seen a similar thread in this forum about using a 'custom tool' built into Fronter but cant find much more info on this.

 

Thanks in advance

[Mako]

It's possible. You just need to understand how Fronter fudges up all your links, because it creates its own directories with each folder you create. I've just uploaded our website to a new folder there, and with a few minutes of updating links to reflect its new Fronter structure, it works as intended (minus the content that's pulled from Wordpress (as its not installed in Fronter) and the headers that are randomised through PHP, Fronter doesn't like that code).

 

For example, my web site sits in a folder. On our web host, links work as intended. Main pages are in the root directory, and most links work as simply "../../downloads.php" (as an example) to get up to that directory if they're in subfolders. The link moves up two levels and looks at that directory and links to that page.

 

However, when uploading this folder to Fronter, its new directory is;

"https://fronter.com/xxxxxxx/links/files.phtml/218189887$474024611$/student+resources/web/downloads.php".

 

As you can see from this link, the root directory has changed, so the links are trying to read into the "218189887$474024611$" folder, so all the links are broken. Changing them all to incorporate "/student+resources/web/" made everything work, including the Javascript navigation, with exception to that already noted above. If your website is primarily HTML and CSS driven, it should work fine. I seem to be having trouble with custom PHP coding, but I'm sure that could be fixed if I spent longer looking at it.

 

As for the custom tool, this mostly serves as a button to attach a link to. You can upload the website to a directory as I've done above, amend the links etc, then create a "custom tool" for a room. When they click that, they'll be taken to the web page.

 

Your own custom tool buttons can be found if you navigate to a room, click the "Room" tool > "Customise Tool Package" (from top-left drop down menu) > New Tool > User-defined button, and point the URL to the index page of your site.

 

Hope this makes sense, and I hope it helps.

[jdoyle]

Udutu has a free option for creating SCORM content that could be downloaded and imported into Fronter. It has the ability to import HTML but I think this a page at a time rather than as a whole site.

 

Udutu | Online Collaborative Course Authoring

 

 

Fronter has an FAQ for testing SCORM packages

 

How do I verify my SCORM course is valid?

 

 

Have you registered on the Fronter Support Forum?

 

Categories - admin forum

[morphy_richards]

It's possible. You just need to understand how Fronter fudges up all your links, because it creates its own directories with each folder you create. .

 

I've just come back to this, started trying to trace myself the directory fudges by uploading a web site.... Bizarrely it worked! (wheras previously everything Mako stated was the case) it seems that at some point between now and June, Fronter have made some changes. Perhaps they read this thread?

Anyway, long and short is that it appears that you can now upload websites with hyperlinks as they are into Fronter and that they will work.

Thanks Mako and Jdoyle for your help.