Weekly Working Thread

Hi everybody! As discussed in our meeting, let’s use this post to communicate between meetings – in particular:

  • leave a comment below every day or two – let us know what lessons you’ve completed
  • if you run into OpenLab problems, put them here – I’ll follow up and see what I can find (include a link where possible)

Thanks, everyone! We’ll talk again next Thursday 7/23, 4pm-5:30pm as usual.

-Jonas

13 thoughts on “Weekly Working Thread”

  1. OpenLab Question 1 from our meeting: links don’t open in new tab, even when “open link in new tab” is selected (look at “Textbook” page on Lin’s site for example)

    1. Hi Lin,

      It looks like this is because of the “WP Accessibility” plugin, which is turned on by default to help out in making sites more accessible to people with disabilities. If it’s essential that your link open in a new tab then you can disable the plugin – here’s what the OpenLab team said:

      Here’s what Bree said about the links: “The first issue is because of the WP Accessibility plugin. It’s not good for accessibility to have links open in a new tab, so we have this disabled by default. But, the appearance of the new tab checkbox is confusing since it doesn’t work, so we got rid of this in the Classic editor, but we should have done the same for Block.”

      So, the solution would be to disable the plugin if it’s important to have the new tab, aside from accessibility concerns.

  2. OpenLab Question 2 from our meeting: Embedded video doesn’t display screen shot of video (Lin’s Lesson page) – only shows gray box

    (when I get a response from the OpenLab team, I’ll post it here)

    1. From the OpenLab team:

      “She also thinks the video issue might be related to your use of the Advanced Video Block plugin– maybe changing a plugin setting or just disabling the plugin will work. I will go play around and see.”

      However, I (Jonas) have used this plugin without running into this problem – so I’m not sure if that’s the issue or not. We’ll wait and see if they discover anything else…

  3. For the OL team: In order to insert media, I need to use the classic editor. Once I make edits using the classic editor, it destroys all of my blocks. Then I have to go back to the page with the block editor and either “Resolve” all of the blocks one at a time OR “Attempt to Recover Block.” This is time consuming and annoying to revisit and have to “fix” all of my blocks every time I make a page.

    1. Hi Marianna! That’s super annoying. Can we find a way for you to accomplish the media insertion tasks you need within the block editor? There are a number of different media-type blocks there. Give us an example of the type of file/media you want to insert, and lets see if we can find a way to do it…

      1. Hi Jonas,

        Thanks for the tip. I can insert a file as a block from the media library. It just looks different but that is fine. This saves me time so THANK YOU!

        Best,
        Marianna

  4. Dropbox as file storage, how to embed video from dropbox:

    I just created a “Course Hub File Repository” folder in our City Tech Dropbox and shared it with you all – let’s use this as a central space to store files if we want to link to them on the Course Hubs.

    Ariane – I’ve put Holly’s folder of 1275 materials in the shared Dropbox Folder. Instructions for embedding them into an OpenLab page are below:

    HOW TO EMBED VIDEOS FROM DROPBOX
    1. In Dropbox, create a share link to the video (and copy the link).
    2. In OpenLab, use the Block called “Video” (doesn’t work with “Advanced Video”), select the option “Insert from URL”.
    3. Paste the link from step 1 , BUT then modify the link by changing the ?dl=0 at the end to ?raw=1.

    It should automatically retrieve a preview image of the video, which will appear on your page.

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