How to Create and Maintain Web Tours

What a Tour Is

The Tours on the Artemis Project web set are documents that link to each other in a specified sequence. At the end of each document, just above the standard footer, the user will find links to the next document in the tour, the previous document, and the home document for that tour. A given document might be on more than one Tour. We do this by adding different colored icons for the tour bus to Tour nav bar, with a note that tells which Tour each color of bus goes to.

How to Set Up a New Tour

To set up a Tour or document ring on the Artemis Project web, do this:

1. Make a list of all the documents you want on the tour

2. Decide the order in which the documents should be linked

3. Create a new document in the /rings/ directory with a file name like 'mytour.ring'. See the /rings/ directory for examples. Your new document lists the full URL of each document on the Tour, in order. Submit an Add Document request to the ASI Web Management System for your new document.

4. Submit a Modify Document request for each document on the list. Add the code for the Tour Nav Bar at the end of the body text in each document. In the Comments field, note that the modification is to add these documents to the Tour, and that all these documents should be published at the same time. Look at the source code for this document for an example of the html code for a Tour Nav Bar. We'll maintain a consistent example of the source code in /rings/webdes-navbar.html.

   We plan to make this easier by setting up some automated processing to include the code for the Tour Nav Bar, using WebSite Director's $include and template processing functions; but we haven't figured out that part yet.

Tour Bus Images

Currently, the tour bus images are stored in this directory in the Artemis Data Book. We'll eventually get a library of different-colored bus images in the Imagery Library.

How to Maintain an Existing Tour

Once we have set up a Tour, we need to maintain it. Several things can make us want to change an existing Tour:

• New document added to the Tour

• Document removed from the Tour

• Change the order of documents in the Tour

• Add an intersection point between two or more Tours

For all but the last of these scenarios, you only need to change the content of the list in '/rings/mytour.ring'. For the last case, where you add an intersetion point between two or more Tours, you'll need to modify the Tour Nav Bar in the affected documents as well as the list of documents in each ring.

Tours Outside the ASI.ORG Domain

A Tour can go outside the asi.org domain. The only difference is that the links to the Tour Engine and tour bus images have to include the asi.org domain hard-coded. And, of course, make sure all documents in the ring have the Nav Bar properly coded and and published on the web before modifying the list of documents in the definition of the ring.

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