Web Objects, External Content, Dynamic Course Content - Help and Advice Requested

Sep 19, 2019

Creating a new thread as others that are similar are old. I've not found a lot of help on this topic in my web searching so am hoping the community here can give me some solid advice. I am confident I came to the right place!

Here's my situation:

We have a giant catalog of eLearning courses all created with Storyline 3. Refreshing these courses is a burden that I am working to resolve.

I am working with Web Objects in an attempt to make refreshing easier by:

Storing images on an external hosting platform and pointing to them with Web Objects.Title banners, slide backgrounds, and slide graphics would all work this way.
All these assets would be hosted on an external platform such as Amazon S3 providing a means to access each via a URL.
Using Web Objects to point to external text sources for onscreen information.Thinking wiki since that would allow for pointing to sections of text.
My hope is that working with Web Objects in this way will allow us to dynamically update content without needing to pull down, edit, and republish courses. I do know that URLs pointed to by WOs would need to stay the same when changing the desired asset. Any other best practices or tips?

 Also, does anybody know how to ensure that WOs respect slide placement when bringing in the external content? In playing around with it I keep getting assets coming into the course in a left justfied alignment rather than the centered alignment I have called for during course development.

6 Replies
Jason Hegel

Was hoping for a less technical solution as this is something that a large team of varying skill levels will need to execute on. I do appreciate the input though and will look into it further. Maybe it's something that I can standardize and simplify for our use. Thanks!

Anybody else have tips on this aspect or any other piece of the puzzle?

Jothan Sargent

Jason, you can change the positioning and size (height, width) of web objects, but the styling of the embedded web objects will be their own and you can't affect that in Storyline. So if you are using centered text and the resource you link out to has left-justified text you need to change the styling of the resource you are linking out to and make that centered text.

In general your approach to keep content external to Storyline to make it easier to update seems like a reasonable approach. You probably just need to start doing some testing and see if it works the way you think it will and if you can control the appearance of the embedded web objects in a way that works for your use.

One other note to consider is that whatever resource you link to should be responsive (think looks good on a mobile device) because the space you allocate for the web object will be a fixed size in Storyline and won't be as big as a web page displayed in a browser.  That consideration may not matter for images which can be a fixed height and width, but will matter when it comes to displaying formatted text.

Jason Hegel

Thank you Jothan!

Your response was very helpful. I am testing away and seeing just what can be done with SL and web objects. It just might do what we need. :)

I am now experiencing the graphics scaling issue with web objects and am not sure what to do. I did reply to another thread that addresses that subject specifically so maybe I'll get help there.

Jason Hegel

Jothan, here is the link to the other thread: https://community.articulate.com/discussions/articulate-storyline/scaling-and-web-objects

The issue I'm having is that a web object that is pointing to an image is showing up scaled fine on my external monitor but when viewed by others on their laptops and when I view on my laptop, it is showing up with vertical and horizontal scroll bars. I am searching for a way to get it to auto scale based on the screen it is being displayed on. Seems like this would be a typical use case and need.

Here's my course if you want to take a look:

https://s3.amazonaws.com/tempshare-stage.storyline.articulate.com/sto_1dll8mgb71qcm7lh1e2arj4o109/story.html

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