Sakai 10 Install Guides

Installation tip

Sakai is highly customizable for your local institution's needs It is recommended that you review the default Sakai properties to get the most out of your experience. Comments explaining the properties often point to a more detailed explanation in Jira.

Default Sakai properties for Sakai 10.0

Demo install

Sakai 10 Install Demo

Binary install

Sakai 10 Install Binary

Source install

Sakai 10 Install from Source

Tomcat - please use Tomcat 7.0.65 .  Tomcat has a bug that should be fixed in release Tomcat 7.0.68.   See 

SAK-30173 - Error page when the URL requested is /portal CLOSED  

Known issues in Sakai 10

 

 

Major change to events in Sakai 10

 

 

Open Jira tickets

For listings of all open issues see:

Blocker Critical Major Minor, trivial

 

Sakai 10 Skin guide

Guide to creating skins for Sakai 2.9 and Sakai 10

This guide will help you tailor the Sakai 2.9 appearance.  It will walk you through the process, listing out the options, pointing out the decisions you will need to make to better fit the needs of your institution.

Although presented as a skinning guide, since what you want to use and how you want to use it is also in the mix, we will be covering a bit of what functionality is involved. Instead of a separate guide for Sakai 10 - will add an addendum for that version.

Sakai 10 Addendum

Incorporate the changes below into your skin. Another alternative is to just proceed as below for 2.9 by copying the Sakai 10 /neo-default skin and editing it. This may be more attractive option if your 2.9 skin is a minimal departure from the default 2.9.

Note: If you are upgrading from 2.8 or 2.7 to 10, just use the 2.9 guide. The addenda will not be needed.

Sprites

The biggest change involved changing the individual tool menu definitions to use sprites. In order to do this the portal markup needed to be changed. See the Subversion tab at:

SAK-23463 - change icons in portal to sprites CLOSED

The easiest possible thing may be to apply the /reference diffs to your skin, or maybe even do it manually. They are extensive, but well defined/contained. Not making these changes will result in strange looking menus. 

Other minor issues

Some of these have made it into the 2.9.x branch, so you may have already addressed them. Again - take a look at the subversion tab to see what changed.

SAK-23528 - Overlapped 'X' text on Presence tool in IE8 VERIFIED  - avoid overlapping x in presence window in IE8

SAK-23540 - unregistered users get mangled menu in more sites panel CLOSED   - fix display of "more sites" panel for unregistered users

SAK-23089 - Schedule adding attachment - Japanese text wrapping CLOSED  -  style update to avoid text wrapping in file selector

SAK-23820 - Login screen doesn't render well on iPad VERIFIED  - better login screen for smaller devices

SAK-25531 - Tutorial not working VERIFIED 

SAK-24418 - Sakai Tutorial Tool Needs Keyboard Focus VERIFIED 

SAK-26185 - Skin changes for Sakai 10 CLOSED  - various changes to the portal tutorial tool

SAK-22651 - FLUID Reorder in Resources has problem with keyboard shortcuts VERIFIED  - small change to make reordered more usable to keyboard only users

SAK-25826 - The open window when you click over short url link of any tool is transparent. CLOSED  - direct link panel rendering changes

SAK-25977 - Home page - adding an image that is too large overlaps synoptic view CLOSED  - contain images rendered in portlets to avoid cropping and/or scrollbars

Finally, the default Sakai 10 skin is a flat skin with no gradients. To take a look at the small changes that make up this see:

SAK-26207 - New default skin (10) some labels white text on white background CLOSED 

SAK-26185 - Skin changes for Sakai 10 CLOSED 

SAK-26207 - New default skin (10) some labels white text on white background CLOSED 

SAK-26277 - Sakai 10 skin - current site should be more prominent CLOSED

 

 

 

 

 

Sakai 2.9.2 Addendum

A wrapper for single column tools was added for 2.9.2 to avoid float drops when using the portlet version of the web content tool.

<div id="innercontent">

The corresponding css should be added to the portal.css of your institution. In neo-default it is:

Sakai 2.9.1 Addendum

There were several changes to the markup and/or the skin for 2.9.1, as well as some things I ran across when I was making a skin for Michigan. These will be listed here. I will get to them 05/25/13.

Old portal  (defaultskin)

You may have excellent reasons to choose the old portal that will run in 2.9 with no problem. If so, please refer to the guide for 2.8 [1]. The good news is that not much has changed in 2.9 for defaultskin, so there will be almost nothing to adapt from your 2.8 installation, and only a little from 2.7. The bad news is that little has changed.

New portal (neoskin)

The new portal represents a substantial departure in Sakai.  You will not be able to edit your 2.7 or 2.8 skin and produce a 2.9 neo portal skin without going mad. The good news is that the 2.9 neo portal is the simplest, best documented and most skinnable portal yet.

Neo portal functional choices

If upgrading from 2.7 (or want to reexamine the choice you made for 2.8) these are some things that have an impact on appearance. 

• Enable the role switcher? For what types of sites? For what roles? What values? [2]

• Enable the timeout alert? With what time value? [3]

• Enable collapsible side menu? [4]

• Categorized “more sites” drawer? or flat?

• Portal chat? Not enabled in 2.9 by default.

Features that may make it into 2.9 or that you may consider merging in.

• Portal tutorial [5]

• Direct link and URL shortener 

Skin choices

• One skin or several? If several you may consider having a primary theme, and others that are just variations.

• Need to differentiate site types? Do you have courses, projects, tutorial, and/or other site types and need to subtly make them different? [6]

• Do you want to make the gateway quite different? [7]

• What login will you be using? Login internal to Sakai, some CAS login? Both?

Getting started

Get a UX person with a strong practical design experience to work with! Then sequester yourselves and produce some options that your stakeholders can check out. Do not get committees involved, life is short (and ars longa). Here is a simple guideline: everything is skinnable, but some things are easier than others. We will get to this soon.

The mechanics

If you are primarily a front-end developer download the demo version of 2.9 that you can download, unzip and run with a few clicks.  To get the demo version – go to the release page for Sakai 2.9 and download and unpack it. As of this writing there is no demo version yet because it has not been released - will update this when that happens.

Start the demo server, this will expand the files we are interested in so that you can work with them.

The skin files are contained in <server folder>/webapps/library/skin:

Skins for defaultskin rendering engine

1. default (default skin for defaultskin rendering engine)

2. default-horiz

3. examp-u

4. gen-u

5. oae

6. rtl

7. some-u

8. ux

Skins for neoskin rendering engine 

1. neo-default (default skin for neoskin rendering engine)

2. neo-default-horiz

3. neo-default29 (deprecated)

4. neo-examp-u

5. neo-gen-u

6. neo-oae (for use in hybrid environments with OAE)

7. neo-rtl

8. neo-some-u

9. neo-ux (deprecated)

and an images folder, as well as tool_base.css

Of the skins for the neoskin rendering engine neo-default29 and neo-ux are not supported and are included just for historical reasons. Note: The default and neo-default skins are required for some things to function correctly (x-login, site info display), do not delete.

Each skin has the following structure.

 skin_name

images (folder containing images used by the skin)
portal.css (styles the portal – will be doing most work here)
pda.css (for the mobile portal)
tool.css (styles the tools, overriding or filling gaps in tool_base.css)
access.css (no need to bother with this) [8]
portalchat.css (no need to bother with this) [9]

Choosing a skin to start of from
 

• Browse to your server at http://localhost:8080/portal, login as admin (pwd: admin).

• Create 7 sites.

• Go to Administration workspace and in the Sites tool given them all different skins - use the list below, but omit the neo- prefix - the portal will add the correct link because you are using the neo portal.

Available and supported skins are (use text below):

• neo-default

• neo-default-horiz

• neo-examp-u

• neo-some-u

• neo-gen-u

• neo-rtl (if you are working in a right lo left language context)

• neo-oae

Here are some screenshots:

 

 

Now you can navigate to the different sites and examine the different skins. Some may be closer to your design than others. Choose the one that seems like the best candidate. Since the portal changes quite a bit depending on whether you are logged in or not you should check it out as a “not logged in” user:

1. go again to the Admin Workspace

2. go to Sites

3. find the!gateway site and click on the link

4. give it the skin you are checking out

5. log out and examine the logged out page with this skin.       

Setting up a new skin

For simplicity’s sake, we are going to assume you have selected neo-default as the skin you are going to use as your base.

1. Copy neo-default skin folder, rename. Make sure your new skin folder name has a “neo-“ prefix.

2. Stop the server

3. Edit <your_server_location>/sakai/sakai.properties

4. Search for word “skin”

5. Make sure that skin.default=<your_new_skin_name minus the "neo-" prefix>

6. Restart the server – now all sites and any new sites will use your skin (change the!gateway site to it if you did it following instructions above)

Some useful tools
 

• Firebug: essential [10]

• CSS Editor (syntax coloring, auto formatting, syntax completion, something like Aptana [11])

• CSS validator [12]

• Gradient [13], box shadow [14] and border-radius [15] generator.

The basics (about 1-2 hours all told, really)

We are going to add a few logos, change the palette.  Line numbers and affected CSS of neo-default/portal.css are included. The selector is also included so that you can search on it.

Logos

The logos in your new skin display at the top left both in the gateway and the logged in portal (below the logo on left, over a gradient for the navigation bar, and at right the current site tab):

Create a logo with a transparency (png recommended). Call it logo.png, put in your_skin/images.The original logo.png is 80 wide, 43 high. The bounding box is 100 x 50.  You can tweak both dimensions a little bit as needed. The CSS for this starts in line 132 of neo-default/portal.css for the gateway:

and in line 330 for the logged in user:

Palette: portal

For the palette in general there are a number of places in neo-default/portal.css that you need to touch. A lot of them could have been grouped/refactored, but were left duplicated in the default for clarity. Below only those places that you need to change because they play nicely with the Sakai palette but may not be too complimentary with yours. You can make more changes if you want of course.

Top bar is a gradient defined in lines 98-107: