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htmlArea 2 Generator 1.01 Doc The following documentation certainly isn't comprehensive, but hopefully it's partly redundant: the program should speak largely for itself. Ideally, you should be able to just boot it up and off you go. But if you have any questions or problems (and I'm sure you will :-) just post them in the forum and I'll get back to you. Purpose The idea behind the htmlArea Generator was to completely automatize the process of creating an htmlArea. I realise that a lot of users are not familiar with HTML or JavaScript, and so the learning curve can be a little steep. This program was intended to eliminate the majority of the work: you pick and choose what buttons / dropdown you want with your mouse, change a few colours, add your own fonts / style list, click "Generate" and there's your code! Functionality At the heart of the program is a demo htmlArea which is updated for whatever configuration you choose. All changes you make are instantly reflected in the demo htmlArea, so there should be few surprises once you click "Generate". There are four tabs. Toolbar: this tab contains two tables, one for Available toolbar elements, and one for Active elements. To add any of the functionality in the leftmost table, just click on it with your mouse and click "Add". This will move it into your active elements, and into your demo htmlArea. Play around with it! The up and down arrows next to the Active table can be used to re-order your htmlArea to whatever order you see fit. Colors: this tab gives you control over setting the colours of the various aspects of the htmlArea. I figured not having a config setting for colours was a failing with htmlArea 2, so I stuck it in here. I also included some prefab "colour sets" for inspiration. :-) Fonts: this tab is mainly intended for people who know the ins and outs of HTML and stylesheets. Basically, it allows you to configure the fonts, font sizes and font styles available in the three dropdown menus in the htmlArea. Here's what all the fields do: Font list Font size list Font style list Note: there's no (or very little) error-checking with these fields: be sure you're entering valid CSS�! After changing any of the values, click "update" to update your demo htmlArea. Generate: this final tab is where it actually generates your code. It contains certain important settings such as the name of your htmlArea, and the names of your files. You can also set the default size of the htmlArea here. Set the appropriate values and click "generate". This will open a popup window with two populated textareas. The first textarea contains a sample webpage with an instance of your newly built htmlArea. The second textarea contains the actual javascript resource file (traditionally your 'editor.js' file). To use these pages, create the files (with the same names) in your /files directory. Then, just load up your example.html file (or whatever you named it) in your browser, and hey presto! Addons What these add-ons do is offer the user the option of having the program create the files directly into their /files directory without having to manually paste the code. The PHP one automatically checks to see if any file already exists with those names, and prompts you to overwrite or not. Note: to initiate the add-on, you'll have to open up the generate_code.html file, and change the global value to "1" for the generate_php / generate_cgi variable. Note: at the present time, only the .php and .cgi add-ons are included in the 1.01 release. The .asp radio button is just a placeholder for future implementation. Compatibility Apart from the add-ons (which are actually quite separate), it's written entirely in JavaScript. The code produced by the htmlArea Generator is something of a hybrid, but the majority of it is based on htmlArea 2.03. Thus, it only runs on IE 5.5 or later. Once the htmlArea (Mozilla compatible) code reaches a moderately stable form, I'll consider implementing a version for that, too. Disclaimer This is not an interactivetools product, so don't blame them if it's not working properly. That would be my fault. ;-) Stuffy Legal Bit The htmlArea Generator is completely open source, so feel free to do whatever you want with it. In fact, I'd very much like to see other people take it over, or at least help work on improvements. (There's a lot more it could do...!) The code it produces, however, is still based on interactivetools.com BSD-based license, which you can find here: http://www.interactivetools.com/products/htmlarea/license.html. What this means is that you should treat the generated code just like you did with the original htmlArea code. Particularly, all redistributions of the souce code must retain the original copyright notice. Changelog 1.0 - initial release Known Bugs
Please report all bugs to the forum. Thankyou's The table functionality available was written by lvni900 from the forums, and we're ALL so appreciative! I can't tell you how many people asked about table controls prior to his code. Also, there's been numerous people who worked on the new create link popup used herein. MUCH appreciation to all you guys. Open source rocks! :-) Improvements / Wish-list I have a list a mile long of things I'd like to fix up / include. Here's a few of the highlights I'd like to see done:
Any takers�? ;-) Ben Keen Last updated: May 12, 2003 |