Time for action—creating a text box for your profile page
- Click on the Edit Profile Page button in the Profile submenu. You will see a page that looks a bit like this:
- You will notice that you are being encouraged to select different blocks from within a set of six tabs at the top of the screen and drag them down onto your View page. Later we will be looking at these blocks and learning how to position them on our page. However, right now we are focusing on how to work with the text box.
Click into the tab called General. You should see this:
- Click and drag the text box icon somewhere onto the space below to position it amongst the other blocks already on your View layout. You will see the other blocks move as you are dragging to make space for the text box. You will also see a dotted gray line showing you where the new block will appear. Here is a basic diagram showing the drag-and-drop action:
Tip
Can't drag and drop in Internet Explorer 6.
The functionality allowing us to drag blocks around the page when we are editing a Mahara View is enabled by JavaScript. Most modern browsers support JavaScript as default, including Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer 7 and 8. Unfortunately, many people are still running Internet Explorer 6 and Mahara's drag-and-drop facility won't work in this browser because of problems (or bugs) it has with layout that newer browsers don't. You can still use IE 6 without the drag and drop feature, and use the radio buttons instead, but we recommend you to upgrade your Internet Explorer browser or (even better) download an open source browser such as Mozilla's Firefox: www.mozilla.com/firefox/.
- A box will open. Click into the Block Title and add your title.
- Click into the Block Content box. Type in here the body of your text box. Janet Norman decided that she would like to have some information about Mahara on her profile page.
- Click Save to finish and that's it, you've added you first text box.
What just happened?
You just added a text box to your profile page.
A section on your View is called a block, and you've just learned how to add a new text box by clicking and dragging it onto your profile page. Blocks are what Mahara uses to personalize your profile page and your Views. You can add and delete blocks, and move them around. There are actually quite a variety of blocks, and the Mahara developers are keen to keep adding to the list. We have started here with a basic text box, as it's probably the one you will use most frequently. In Chapter 4 we will be exploring what we can do with the other blocks that are already available.
One of the things you probably noticed when adding text to your text box was that you have a number of editing options available. Janet would like to make her text look more interesting, so let's revisit our text box and look at what these options do.
Options in the text editor
You will probably find that you have already used most of the options in the text editor when working in word processing programs. Let’s have a quick look at some of the most commonly used options.
Now let's try formatting some of the text you have just entered.