Adapt Learning Community: Switching between framework and authoring tool

Getting to grips with Adapt for the first time this week and really loving its power and flexibility.

I'm beginning to understand that many of the existing plugins available in github aren't fully authoring-tool ready. I've looked at adjusting a few so that I can upload to the tool, but have had as many misses as hits.

Does anyone have any experience of switching between the authoring tool and the framework? My theory would be that I could do a lot of initial build in the authoring tool, then take some kind of src export and further develop 'manually' what I couldn't do within the tool's constraints.

Hi Gareth

I also had this thought. I tried to do it, but one of the things that I couldn't get to work (although someone else may know how to do it) is the grunt server to preview the changes. I need to be able to see what I'm doing outside the code as I'm still pretty new to CSS/LESS coding.

I have to say though, I started working in the tool, and am now building in the Framework exclusively as I find it quite easy to work with, with a bit of practice. I love that I can have the code open on one screen and the course on another. As I make changes, I can see it straight away, or I can see in the command line where the error is (usually an errant comma!).

I'm sure the Tool will improve once they shift priority away from the Framework, but until then, I'm happy with the Framework.

Simon

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Thanks Simon.

I guess if grunt server doesn't work you could maybe use something like live preview (which is particularly well integrated with the Brackets code editor) or live reload (http://livereload.com/). In terms of quickly compiling from LESS to CSS I'm also a big fan of CodeKit (https://incident57.com/codekit/) on the Mac -- though there are various PC equivalents too (e.g. https://prepros.io/).

So far as moving between the authoring tool and the framework is concerned, for me it's more about the relative convenience of getting a lot of content across into the right JSON format/structure, especially when working with team members who are much more comfortable with a CMS. I'd love to be able to get all the content roughly in place via the authoring tool, then dump that out in a way I could drop into a framework project for styling, incorporating plug-ins that don't work well with the authoring tool, and so on.

I'd be interested to know how those working with the framework are handling the general data-entry. Just by copying and setting up by hand into JSON? Or have people got scripts/processes for quickly converting across from source documents?

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