Amberjack is a Javascript library for making interactive site tours. In this lightning talk, I discuss a wrapper of Amberjack for Plone which lets you make tours in your Plone site. This product was developed at the Bolzano and Sorrento sprints and presented as a lightning talk at the Plone Symposium East 2009.

1. Interactive
tours/tutorials
with Amberjack
Nate Aune, Jazkarta
Plone Symposium East 2009
Lightning Talk

2. You want to:
• Create a guided tour of your site/product
• promotional purposes
• instructional purposes
• Engage the user
• interacts with the site by clicking and typing

3. Enter Amberjack
• create site tours without taking screenshots
or making screencasts
• improves the usability of your site though
easy, great looking and helpful tours
• lightweight, stable, LGPLed, and browser
compatible Javascript library
More info at www.amberjack.org

7. collective.amberjack
• Plone wrapper for Amberjack
• Comes with two sample tours
• adding a new event
• adding a Youtube video

8. Packages
• collective.amberjack.buildout
• collective.amberjack.core
• collective.amberjack.portlet
• collective.amberjack.metatour
• collective.amberjack.plonetour

9. collective.amberjack.buildout
• Check out this buildout if you want to try
out Amberjack in your Plone site.
• Checks out the other packages into the
/src directory.

10. collective.amberjack.core
• Core is the engine of the entire model:
• javascript files
• layouts for the popup
• images
• css

11. collective.amberjack.portlet
• Portlet where you can configure which tour to
run (actually writing the tourId in a field) and
with which skin.
• Proposed: provide an alternative portlet where
the user can choose among a dropdown list
which tour to launch.

12. collective.amberjack.metatour
• This is the tour itself.
• Provides a viewlet containing the tour in a
quot;amberjake-likequot; way. See demo.pt for an
example.
• a set of microsteps defined in an quot;abstractquot;
way. For example a microstep may say
quot;write 'helloworld' in the title_fieldquot;:
AjSteps = {
'1': new AjStep('new_folder','',''),
'2': new AjStep('form_title','','MyFolder'),
...
}

13. collective.amberjack.metatour
• Provides Plone content types to make:
• A tour
• The steps for the tour
• Non-technical users can make new site
tours w/o needing to know HTML.

14. Demo
http://localhost:8080/amberjack/

22. Benefits

23. Tour is just an HTML file

24. Branded tours
Unlike screencasts, the tour does not have the
'look' of Plone hardcoded into it.

25. Multilingual tours
Use Plone's i18n features
to make tour in more than one language

26. Modular tours
Unlike screencasts, if the site changes,
you don't have to redo the tour.

27. Interactive tours
Unlike screencasts which are passive experiences,
this engages the user by interacting with the site.

28. Future
• Paster template to quickly create new tours
• And/or modify existing paster template to
create /tour directory with skeleton code
• Use Selenium to create tours
• Create site tour content with Plone
• Provide sample tour with audio voiceovers
• Create tour of Plone.org

29. Proposed mini-tours
• Adding a Folder (on Main Navigation)
• Adding a Page (inside a folder)
• Setting a Page as the Landing Page of a Folder
• Arranging the Order of Content (= The Navigation Order)
• Excluding Files from Aggregated Navigation
• Creating an image gallery
• Adding Google Analytics
• Set up a New User / Group
• etc...

30. Thanks to...
• Team at Sorrento '09 / Bolzano '08 sprints
• Massimo
• Stefano
• Harito
• Giorgio
• Daniel

31. More info
• Project page:
http://www.openplans.org/projects/collectiveamberjack/project-home
• Sorrento sprint tasks
http://www.openplans.org/projects/sorrento-sprint-2009/amberjack-site-tours
• Buildout:
http://svn.plone.org/svn/collective/collective.amberjack.buildout/trunk/
• Mailing list:
collectiveamberjack-discussion@lists.openplans.org