Seeking building guidance...

[Clancy56]

Hello all,

I am seeking guidance on how best to turn the mock up page below into a template for a training piece I want to develop, or if someone knows of a model that I can use as a base to start from that would work too.

My coding skills are rather limited; I understand some ActionScript, JavaScript, and some CSS.

What I would like to accomplish the following.

1. Have A, B, C, D, and E all be pulled from an XML file, which I will have to learn but seems the best way for the writer’s to create and update the training copy.

2. Item A. will be used for closed caption copy which I will make a div that can be turned on and off by a button

3. For items B, C, and E I would like to use to use AJAX or a Virtual Pagination script
to call them onto the page so the training piece appears more like a Flash presentation.

Ideally what I would like to accomplish is to develop a training piece that pulls all of it’s content from one script that the authors can easily change there copy and the designers just have to drop their files into a directory and be heavily involved.

I would really appreciate any help or guidance that you can offer.

Thank you,

Clancy

[Twey]

There's going to be quite a lot of server-side involvement here. What languages do you have available to run on the server?

[Clancy56]

Thank you for the quick reply.

MySQL and PHP both of which I have no experience in.

[Jon101]

Just to see if i fully understand.. You are trying to create this site so authors can come, log in, and input their articles?

[Twey]

Well, the best way would be to have each page fully generated by a server-side script from the XML provided. At the prompting of a request variable, though, it should be able to provide only the specific part of the page required. Links on the page will point to the whole pages, but have onclick events that populate their respective areas using that minimal data before cancelling the event to avoid refreshing the whole page. Document fragments should be used to best effect to keep bookmarks as workable as possible.

[Clancy56]

Thank you all, but I think it sounds more complicated then it really is...

The authors and other designers will work with me here in the office in developing the training course and once the training product is finished it will be posted to the web to be used for training.

I know I can build the whole thing in Flash again but I wanted to get away from that and only use Flash for the live art area which would be area (E) in the jpg file. I wanted to use CSS also to eliminate a lot of the formatting issues.

The piece I did in Flash can be seen at ( http://204.117.77.25/tng_prods/c4s_frames/abcs64eo.htm ) and you can also see how I want to handle the closed captioning from page to page. So I guess the bottom line is I want to generate a piece in HTML, CSS, AJAX, and whatever to function like the Flash piece I did. And if all of the copy could come from and XML or .TXT file for the whole course all the better.

Thanks,

Clancy