In this article I will briefly discuss the customization of the Task Panel.
On the Welcome Page, in the bottom left is a nice section entitled How Do I… that contains handy information on how to accomplish a whole slew of tasks in Contribute.
What I found during my research into customizing the client is that this section of the page is controlled by the contents on an XML file. Each of the categories and their items can be changed to suit the needs of your deployment and your users.
The files for the Task Panel are located here:
Mac – /Applications/Adobe Contribute CS3/Configuration/Content/Tasks
Win – C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Contribute CS3\Configuration\Content\Tasks
The XML and CSS files controlling the Task Panel and it’s contents are
- Tasks.css
- Tasks.xml
- TasksLayout.xml
The TasksLayout.xml file contains the table structure definitions of the Task Panel, since like many other components of the Contribute client, this section is controlled and populated using HTML.
The Tasks.xml file contains the actual text of the category structure. Each category is defined with a unique ID number and each task is defined within that category node along with an ID number and associated HTML file containing the content of the task. Each of the ID numbers are sequential.
The HTML files are named sequentially by default, but this doesn’t appear to be necessary in order to make everything work properly.
If any of your custom tasks have images associated with them, they need to be placed in the images directory so that they will be found. The images need to be referenced with the source relative to the location of the associated task HTML file.
Adobe Contribute, Software
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