This is a "reflexive LTI add-on" for Canvas that allows for a minor ecosystem of smaller, modular CSS and JavaScript tweaks to the Canvas UI. The "reflexive" nature of this structure allows the plug-ins to access the Canvas API to make more complex modifications and additions to the UI (e.g. per-course assignment templates or additional global navigation menus).
This is currently in a pre-release state: I'm using it on the St. Mark's live instance. But I haven't documented my code terribly well, and there are a number of tweaks that are likely to take place before the 1.0 release, most notably a change to the current manifest structure, which was dealt with expediently, rather than correctly.
This LTI is heavily dependent on the Composer PHP package-management system. Each of the current plugins is a separate package. A plugin package has the following core qualities:
- It has a manifest file at its root:
manifest.xml - The manifest file defines some basic metadata about the plugin, and then describes which pages and DOM elements in the Canvas UI are modified by this plugin.
- The manifest references other CSS and Javascript files, which may themselves refer back to other scripts in the package. (For example: to make the per-course templates "go", the manifest defines a regex to match the front page of a course and provides a script file that embeds a template chooser form. When the template is selected by a user, that selection is processed by a script (
template-copy.php) that accesses the API and then redirects the user back to the newly created, templated object.