Our Adapt offering has been under development for 6 months updating the components, menus, extensions and themes while at the same time the Adapt Project has been updating the Authoring tool and Framework. On February 21st, we launched the combined changes while continuing documentation. Today that documentation has been completed and we consider Adapt 4.5 live!
The scope of the changes to the framework and authoring tool are both huge and subtle. Nearly every element has been touched in some way. Some changes are small and difficult to notice, others huge. All of them make for a better product and better courses. Here’s a few highlights.
A new theme Wave was launched that seeks to “break the box” and add lots of, well, waves to components, blocks, articles and menus.
In addition, Wave is the first theme to support custom color schemes. When you select the theme for your course, you’re presented with the list of colors for each of the major areas of the course. Just select the colors you want (making sure they’re accessible) and save the colors as a preset.
There are three new components: Stacks, Panels and Reveal. All of these new controls are presentation components: Reveal and Panels are similar in use to accordions with different interaction style. Stacks is a staged reveal of content like lists or steps.
Grid is a Block-level extension that allows you to alter the size of the components within a block, control their vertical alignment and hide blocks on mobile (so cell phone users don’t have to download huge graphics and animation).
The new Flex Menu is a single-panel menu with large images.
It’s not possible to document every new feature in this post, but there are a few that deserve special attention.
Components now have a small badge at the right of the component title that indicates whether the component is complete or incomplete.
All pages within the course can have small flags at the top right of the page header that are displayed if the page or course is complete.
The Go To Page component now has the option to require the user to complete the current page before they can continue to the next page. This dialog offers users the option to go to the first incomplete item on the page or display the Page-Level Progress menu.
All of these features are live for the CPM instance of Adapt. The OU HR instance of Adapt will be updated in the coming weeks once we’ve established that there are no major issues with the installation.
Also during this time we’ve updated the Solutions website to give it a fresh, streamlined look and updated the documentation for Adapt and Totara, making the content easier to navigate and read.