Landing page customisation and translation support

Hi folks, we’re looking at what it will take to customise the BBB landing page.

https://dev.meet.coop

As you can see, we already have the screen logo top-left and we’ve also customised the main colourscheme to use #32bf7f, which is the light-green colour from the logo. This can all done in the administration web interface.

However, in order to change text on the landing page, we need to make changes to the source code of Greenlight (the front-end you see when you visit https://dev.meet.coop). Following the documentation, this means we need to:

  1. Edit the HTML of the landing page (source listing here)
  2. Change the text of the landing page.

Now, Greenlight intends to support a whopping 53 languages (a smaller subset are fully available). Here are the listings from the source. That means if we edit the english text, we need to have translations for the rest of the supported languages :sweat_smile:

So, the questions are:

  1. Can we get a mock-up / idea of what is wanted on the landing page?
  2. Can we target a small number of languages and get translations for them?

I guess if we don’t support a localisation, we can use the default text?

2 Likes

I’d suggest that as an absolute minimum we need a different title for each server, and a link to an about page (https://www.org.meet.coop/) so this HTML template code:

<h1 id="main-text" class="display-4 mb-4"> <%= t("landing.welcome").html_safe %></h1>
<p class="lead offset-lg-2 col-lg-8 col-sm-12 "><%= t("landing.about", href: link_to(t("greenlight"), "https://bigbluebutton.org/2018/07/09/greenlight-2-0/", target: "_blank", rel: "noopener")).html_safe %></p> 

Will need the landing.welcome and landing.about strings editing in the locales files, for example for English:

I have created a wiki page to list the different servers we have, they will all probably need different H1's?

3 Likes

OK, makes sense @chrisc.

To lay out a plan then: we had “prod” and “dev” tags for the different greenlight containers but it looks like we’ll need to just match those against the different deployment instead. I’ll create branches/tags/customisations to match each server instance and customise the landing.welcome to specify “welcome to X instance” and landing.about for the dev instances will have a warning. I’ll wait on some copy for the end-user facing instances.

1 Like

By default the landing page has this text:

Welcome to BigBlueButton.

Greenlight is a simple front-end for your BigBlueButton open-source web conferencing server. You can create your own rooms to host sessions, or join others using a short and convenient link.

> #### Watch our tutorial on using Greenlight

A more appropriate text could be:

Welcome to The Online Meeting Cooperative

A co-operative, open source, meeting and conferencing platform, powered by BigBlueButton and by people and organisations who contribute time, servers and money to make this happen. You can create your own rooms to host sessions, or join others using a short and convenient link.

Read more in the About page and Get involved!

> #### Watch our tutorial on using BBB’s Greenlight frontend

I also think for users it doesn’t make sense to focus the landing on Greenlight, but instead I’d focus the attention on BBB in general, with the default slide presented that are presented when logging into a BBB room.

Apart from the landing page we’d also want to change the default slide presentation that’s presented at any room when opening. I suggest we improve a little bit the first slide I made for The Online Meeting Coop, Login – Nextcloud, convert it into PDF and substitute the file in the git repo.

3 Likes

Nice, work will be tracked against https://git.coop/meet/greenlight/-/issues/2.

2 Likes

BTW, I just found in the docs how we can change the default presentation.

Change the default presentationAnchor link for: change the default presentation

When a new meeting starts, BigBlueButton displays a default presentation. The file for the default presentation is located in /var/www/bigbluebutton-default/default.pdf . You can replace the contents of this file with your presentation. Whenever a meeting is created, BigBlueButton will automatically load, convert, and display this presentation for all users.

Alternatively, you can change the global default by editing /usr/share/bbb-web/WEB-INF/classes/bigbluebutton.properties and changing the URL for beans.presentationService.defaultUploadedPresentation .

# Default Uploaded presentation file
beans.presentationService.defaultUploadedPresentation=${bigbluebutton.web.serverURL}/default.pdf

You’ll need to restart BigBlueButton after the change with sudo bbb-conf --restart .

If you want to specify the default presentation for a given meeting, you can also pass a URL to the presentation as part of the create meeting API call.


I made a basic slide set here. I’m not happy with the colours, i.e. I tried to make the icons change from blue to green, but I’m clearly no magician with The Gimp or other design tools :frowning:

2 Likes

So for now, I’ve got that into the Ansible setup, handled in Configure the default presentation (#21) · Issues · meet / bbb · GitLab. I’ve also dropped that into the demo.meet.coop instance. Once you get a final cut of the presentation, send it on and we can replace files/default-presentation.pdf · master · meet / bbb · GitLab.

2 Likes

https://docs.bigbluebutton.org/2.2/customize.html#change-the-default-welcome-message

Shall we also get some default room text that is more specific for meet.coop?

2 Likes

Yes that would be ideal!

1 Like

Seems the default is the following:

defaultWelcomeMessage=Welcome to <b>%%CONFNAME%%</b>!<br><br>For help on using BigBlueButton see these (short) <a href="event:http://www.bigbluebutton
.org/html5"><u>tutorial videos</u></a>.<br><br>To join the audio bridge click the phone button.  Use a headset to avoid causing background noise for o
thers.
defaultWelcomeMessageFooter=This server is running <a href="http://docs.bigbluebutton.org/" target="_blank"><u>BigBlueButton</u></a>.

I’ll blag something more relevant and make it configurable so we can switch it up easier later. Will track against https://git.coop/meet/bbb/-/issues/24.

1 Like

We are doing some customizations of GreenLight so a room creator can upload a presentation before the chat starts - happy to invite anyone to the repo!

1 Like

@freescholar Pre-uploading a presentation works since Greenlight v2.7.

I would be interested to know more about the features you want to implement.

Oops, yes it does - I meant to say that the uploaded presentation would be available for all of the rooms in a conference group.
We would love people to join our discussion in GitLab - https://gitlab.com/wolcen/greenlight-local
Not looking to recreate the wheel if it is already there!
I would like to schedule a chat perhaps next week with the tech members on the work we are doing in GreenLight. I can give a short tour of what Agaric has so far - WordPress integration, Canvas integration and the work on GreenLight.
Especially this list of people, sysadmins and others at meet.coop.:

We searched for a gitlab or github for GreenLight development and could not find one - did I miss it?

1 Like

If you mean the official one, it’s here:

If you mean Meet.coop customisations, sadly our current code is not actually open at this time, see:

I was seeking one specifically for greenlight and related to meet.coop, thanks for the link to git.coop.meet
I see there is only one issue in the queue there and it has not been addressed in 4 months

I was wondering if Agaric should ask for access to make a branch? I tried to register and got an error: * Email domain is not authorized for sign-up
I think I have to contact webarchitects but it looks like you have to be a member of their coop to join. Greenlight project is not in the public repo list.

How to get our 2 projects on the same page is the question. We have 2 developers doing some good work and I think it would be a great candidate for use by meet.coop when completed (Version 1 of BBB Conferences)

1 Like

I’d suggest Agaric just join Web Architects :grinning:

It’s only £1 (or maybe £10 for an org) and then you can use git.coop.

@hng may know where existing code for meet.coop Greenlight lives?

See LDAP integration experiment at femProcomuns - #6 by hng