Thursday 30 August 2007

DragMath

I'm taking a bit of a break from experimenting this week as it's the bank holiday in the UK and everyone is away (apart from me - boo hoo). I've been thinking about the YourMathsTutor website and finding a neat way of integrating some sort of LaTeX maths editor into the forum to make it easier for people to include extracts of maths in their posts. I'm a Moodler, amongst other things (yes - it is legal. Click here for more information). And being a member of the Moodle Mathematical Tools forum I came across the new DragMath tool from Chris Sangwin and Alex Billingsley at The University of Birmingham here in the UK. I thought it would be marvellous to incorporate this tool into the YourMathsTutor forum. To view the results of an afternoon's sawing and hammering noises coming from the forum corner of the YourMathsTutor site click here.

The YourMathsTutor forum is actually an SMF (which stands for Simple Machines Forum) forum, a pretty powerful open source forum which has only been going a few years but even so is becoming extremely popular.

If you are interested in how I integrated DragMath into my forum then you can download a tar.gz archive with all the bits you need (and a readme) from here. Maybe there is a better way of doing it? If so then please do post a comment. I think DragMath is an excellent bit of work and would love to see it take off.

6 comments:

MyChemistryTutor said...

Wow! This is exactly what I was hoping to integrate in my chemistry help forum www.mychemistrytutor.com

Thanks Thanks Thanks

YourMathsTutor said...

It's a pleasure. There has been loads of interest in DragMath, which is great to see. If you need any help integrating it into your forum then please do let me know.

Ian.

Slushie said...

Looks great!!! Been wanting to add an equation editor to our school's math site for a while.
Noticed that you've updated SMF to 1.1.4, before I try adding Dragmath to our site, are there any changes to your instructions that I need to be aware of for 1.1.4?
Thanks!

YourMathsTutor said...

No changes required :)

Ian.

Unknown said...

Awesome! Will fit incredibly at my engineering forum. The only problem is that I'm using SMF 2.0 beta 3.1 public, and your instructions don't seem to work :-S.

First of all, the piece of code to be inserted inside post.template.php must be inserted into GenericControls.template.php. Apart from that, when I try to use it in my forum I get these two errors:

-bbc_highlight is not defined
-XML descendants internal method called on incompatible HTMLCollection

I don't think it will be very difficult to solve, will it?

Thanks in advance ;-)

Unknown said...

I was able to make it work.

http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=258518.0

Thanks anyway ;-).