[Sugar-devel] [RFC] Content support

[Manuel Quiñones]

2013/6/29 Daniel Drake <dsd at laptop.org>:
> Hi,
>
> Content bundles have long been both a crucial part of the OLPC-Sugar
> offering, and a pain through having some deficiencies.
> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Creating_a_collection
>
> They are important because it is the only easy way for a deployment to
> add pre-made content to Sugar (e.g. books). The strong point of the design
> here is that beyond a not-too-strange library.info metadata file, you
> do not have to interact with anything too technical (e.g. python) beyond
> the HTML content itself. It is something that seems to fall within
> capabilities of deployment teams without much difficulty, whereas activity
> development is often a painful step up.
>
> They are quite widely used and in my experience visiting deployments
> "how do we add our content to the laptop" is a very frequent question - I
> always ran training sessions on content bundles in response.
>
> However they are a pain because Sugar never really supported them very well.
> Sugar can launch them from the Journal, but shipped content that the user
> has never opened before does not exist in the Journal, so there was something
> missing here.
>
> To fill the gap, OLPC added a system (olpc-library) to produce a HTML index
> of content bundles and this is the Browse homepage, but that isn't great
> either - it's not part of Sugar where it should be, and users have to open
> the web browser as if they are going online when they are just looking to
> open some preinstalled content.
>
> With my recent work on automatic activity updates, we had to add content
> bundles to the bundle registry so that they will be updated appropriately.
> Now that this is done, it is very easy to remove this deficiency. The small
> patch below makes content bundles appear alongside activities, in the list
> and favourites views. They are launched as expected with a click.
>
> It does need some uninteresting tweaks in the bundle classes in
> sugar-toolkit-gtk3 as well, but the real bulk of the change is here.
> Any thoughts/comments?

I like the idea.  This looks very related to web activities.  They
look similar because collections have their own icon, and with this
patch they will appear alongside activities.

What about runnig them in a webkit webview, without an url entry and
other browser specific controls?

--
.. manuq ..