Beth Soderberg 2:12 pm on August 1, 2015
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Recap of July 31 Slides Meeting

Slack log (Requires SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. login to view. Set one up if you don’t have a Slack account)

We held a special meeting to discuss the subject of lesson plan slides.

Background

Last year at the community summit we discussed the inclusion of slides and were able to lay out some of the bigger concerns about using them. Since then we have tried a few different things along with coming up with a basic list of what we would want if we had a pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party. Most recently there has been an attempt to use the photoshop comps made about a year ago and try them as google slides. This would have still been a stop-gap measure as many of the concerns brought up are really only solvable via a plugin. Concerns the team has discussed related to the slides include:

  • accessibilityAccessibility Accessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility)
  • backwards compatibility
  • reuse
  • learning curve
  • lack of internet
  • design consistency between different sets of slides
  • maintainability
  • ease of updates

We’ve discussed the plugin many times over the past year including in January.

Pros and Cons of Google Slides
Pros

  1. The platform is similar to something many are familiar with as it’s much like PPT or Keynote.
  2. Allows color changes that would address accessibility issues.
  3. Allows offline mode and downloading of PDF versions.
  4. Allows for submission of template on Google Slides’ “repo”.

Cons

  1. There is no way to import the lesson plan content automatically as updates occur.
  2. May be hard to use.
  3. Seems to require fixed aspect ratio.
  4. Keeping design consistency from slide to slide, even with the master template, seems impossible to control with lots of people editing since you can just drag and drop elements on each slide.

The Reveal Option
Reveal came about as an idea after @bethsoderberg‘s initial HTMLHTML HTML is an acronym for Hyper Text Markup Language. It is a markup language that is used in the development of web pages and websites./CSSCSS CSS is an acronym for cascading style sheets. This is what controls the design or look and feel of a site. cutup earlier this year failed because of the impossibility of controlling vertical height issues. Reveal is just HTML, CSS, and JS and accounts for the slide height issues and theoretically it could also be integrated with a plugin.

Suggestions
@courtneydawn suggested a course of action moving forward that was discussed and agreed to by meeting attendees:

  1. We go back to creating a document that serves as a requirements definition doc for our pretend plugin.
    This will allow us all as a team to say what we think are necessary functionalities of our dream slide plugin
    and what would be just nice to have. We finish this by the time WCUSA comes around so we can workshop it with other teams and see if there are people out there who can help us.
  2. Rework the Google slides (if there is a volunteer) with no design components so that we can see what happens when the aesthetic functionality is not an issue. (@melindahelt volunteered to take this on with her most recent set of slides)
  3. See if someone who is going to do a test of one of our plans wants to create a set of slides of either Google or Reveal nature.

The overarching goal here is to create a series of functional test cases to look at together so that we can all discuss at WCUSA.

Moving forward @courtneydawn will lead a slides conversation every other week in the weekly team meetings that will establish the scope required for a plugin as well as enable the team to have a true sense of the universe of needs and issues with the slides so that we can make informed decisions at WCUSA.

#slides