As of August 1st, 2008, the Edutech web site will no longer be. Edutech was funded by the Swiss Virtual Campus programme, which ended on July 31st, 2008. Some activities will be taken over by the e-Learning Services group at the SWITCH foundation.

How to Integrate edutech Content Pages

Method 1: Direct Inclusion

The raw content of a page is directly included and embedded into one of your web pages. This is usually done with a simple inclusion statement in your preferred web server scripting language.

Example: PHP code to include conference page

<html>
<head>
<title>Events</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Conferences and Events</h1>
<table>
<tr><td>
    this is our left navigation
  </td><td>
    <?php include ("http://www.edutech.ch/resource/conf-inc.php"); ?>
  </td></tr>
</table>
This is our footer
</body>
</html>

This page is stored on your server. It dynamically includes the current list of conferences whenever someone loads this page from your web server. This is how the above example would look like on an external site.

These are the content URLs currently available from edutech:

http://www.edutech.ch/resource/conf-inc.php (Conferences and Events)
http://www.edutech.ch/resource/toolbox-inc.php (Toolbox)
http://www.edutech.ch/resource/inst-inc.php (eLearning Institutions; add "?swiss=1" if you only want Swiss competence centres)

If you include the toolbox content, you should also explicitly pass all arguments, like in this PHP statement:

include ("http://www.edutech.ch/resource/toolbox-inc.php?".$HTTP_SERVER_VARS["QUERY_STRING"]);

Method 2: Indirect Inclusion

Basic idea: Our server loads a page from your web server that contains only the navigation, and dynamically includes the syndicated content in it.

Get a typical page of your site and save it as a new file on your web server. Give it a new name, for example, emptypage-tools.html or emptypage-conferences.html.
Remove all the content of the page except for your corporate identity elements and navigation aids of your site. You should be able to display this empty page in a normal browser.
At the location in the page where the edutech content should appear put the following HTML comment:

 For the tools page

 For the conferences list
Send us the URL of your empty page which includes the above mentioned comment. We will add an account for you in our database and send you back the URL of the complete page (including your institution code), which is customized according to your needs.

Here's an example of such an empty page (view online):

<html>
<head>
<title>Events</title>
</head>
<body>
<img src='logo.png'>
<h1>Conferences and Events</h1>
<table>
<tr><td>
    this is our left navigation
  </td><td>
    <!--Edutech:Events-->
  </td></tr>
</table>
This is our footer
</body>
</html>

A tools collection page which is customized with the above empty page displays as follows http://www.edutech.ch/resource/conf-synd.php?inst=test.

These are the currently available content URLs that we can create for you (replace xyz by your institution code):

http://www.edutech.ch/resource/conf-synd.php?inst=xyz (Conferences and Events)
http://www.edutech.ch/resource/toolbox-synd.php?inst=xyz (Toolbox)

Notice that:

We don't make a copy of your empty page. It is dynamically included by our server whenever you access your customized page. Therefore you should not change it's name or location on the server (or you should send us the new URL).
You can change your corporate identity and navigation aids in the empty page whenever you want to. The changes are immediately visible in the customized tools page (You don't need to inform us about such changes).

Customization of Included Content

The look-and-feel of the content pages is defined by CSS. Fonts, colors, and text sized are inherited from the CSS of your environment. Additionally, an inluded page automatically links to a default CSS stored at edutech in order to define the appearance of its specific tags.

You can customize this CSS: Download the default CSS (save as..) from edutech, adapt it according to your gusto, and link to it in your header. The included page should then be prevented from linking to it's defaut CSS by supplying the parameter nocss=1.

Example:

<html>
<head><title>Events</title>
<link href='your-customized.css' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Conferences and Events</h1>
<?php include ("http://www.edutech.ch/resource/conf-inc.php?nocss=1"); ?>
</body>  
</html>

`<!--Edutech:Toolbox-->`		For the tools page
`<!--Edutech:Events-->`		For the conferences list