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Getting started

The Content Styler formats the content on the page into a clean structure and will reformat specially marked items using component and modifier codes into stylised containers.

Content styler item#

The Content Styler is activated by adding a unique Blackboard item to the pages to be reformatted. The styler item will insert scripts and stylesheets, which format the content of the page, but the content-styler item itself is not shown in student view.

Tip

Toggling edit mode off will show what the site will look like for students.

Note

The content-styler item can be in any order on the page. Some put it at the beginning to remind that it is there, others move it to the end to keep it out of the way.

Example

Sample in academic view

Sample in student view

Setup#

The content-styler item can be copied from the sample pages (TBA) or existing pages in your site. The advanced section of this documentation has instructions on creating the item manually.

Important

The page must be set to Show “Icons and Text”. This setting is available in the dropdown menu next to the page title, or can be set for the entire site from the Style Settings page (Site Management → Customisation → Style Settings → Default Content View).

Important

The content styler item must be named “content-styler”. This allows the script to know that that specific item should be hidden in the student view.

Tools#

When viewing a styled page a tools menu will appear in the top-right corner of the page. This menu can be used to change settings for the content styler while developing page content.

Cache#

Navigation information is cached locally to improve reload times. The cached data is refreshed from the Blackboard API once every 24 hours or if the browser is closed. These requests can take some time to return causing delays in rendering the page.

An immediate update of the cache can be performed by selecting Update cache from the Tools menu.

Danger

If there are any recent navigation changes (i.e. changes to content folders), they will not be immediately reflected in the current navigation without forcing are load of the cache.

Note

The Tools menu is not visible to students.