Meet Tourette. An advanced tour engine for web apps.
From Wikipedia:
"Tourette syndrome [...] is an inherited neuropsychiatric disorder with onset in childhood, characterized by multiple physical (motor) tics and at least one vocal (phonic) tic. These tics characteristically wax and wane, can be suppressed temporarily, and are preceded by a premonitory urge. Tourette's is defined as part of a spectrum of tic disorders, which includes provisional, transient and persistent (chronic) tics."
And this plugin provides a solid platform for page tours...
...that show you some elements and can trigger automated events (open menus, tick checkboxes, fill text areas, etc), effectively taking control of the browser...
...so Tourette is darn good name!
How do you create your own tours?
It's pretty simple. First make sure to include jQuery (1.8+ would do) and both Tourette's JS and CSS files
CSS
<link rel="stylesheet" href="css/tourette.css">
JS
<script type="text/javascript" src="js/jquery.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="js/tourette.js"></script>
Then build your great web app or web site, you just need some markup to play with.
And here's the interesting part: create your tour definition file
This is the 'map' to your landmarks: each landmark represents an stop in the tour and can be related to a page element.
The basic structure of a tour is a very simple JSON:
{
"name":"Sample tour",
"author":"Your name, email, etc",
"landmarks":[]
}
As you may have guessed, landmarks will hold each of our tour stops, based on the following structure:
{
"name":"landmark-name",
"title":"Landmark Title",
"contents":"The text to be shown on the prompt, it may include HTML tags, just try to keep it simple and concise.",
"element":".element-selector",
"actions":[]
}
Landmarks may have a related page element or not: you can put null on element or a jQuery selector to match the desired element.
And then come the actions. Each prompt can hace one or more buttons to navigate the tour or to trigger custom events/interactions.
Actions are defined by the following structure:
{
"text":"Button text",
"cssClass":".button-class",
"action":"Button.action"
}
Tourette comes with some predefined actions:
Tourette.nextJump to the next landmarkTourette.prevJump to the previous landmarkTourette.showShow the first landmarkTourette.hideQuit the tour
If you want to do other things, you may put a custom action name and use it through the onButton callback. More on this below.
If you want to use custom classes on each button, fill the optional cssClass item.
Once you have your tour definition ready you will need to initialize Tourette:
var tourette = $.Tourette({ /* options */ }); // Construct a new Tourette object
Then just load your tour file and start the tour. Is that easy!
$.ajax({
url: 'tour.json',
dataType: 'json',
success: function(response) {
tourette.load(response);
tourette.start();
}
});
You may customize the markup of Tourette elements as well as specify callbacks to know when something happens:
overlayMarkupThe overlay markup, defaults to<div class="tourette-overlay"></div>promptMarkupThe prompt markup, defaults to<div class="tourette-prompt"></div>buttonMarkupThe button markup, defaults to<a href="#" class="tourette-button"></a>onShowonShow callback (see the next section)onHideonHide callback (see the next section)onStartonStart callback (see the next section)onExitonExit callback (see the next section)onButtononButton callback (see the next section)
For example, to use Bootstrap buttons you may do:
var tourette = $.Tourette({
buttonMarkup: '<a href="#" class="tourette-button btn btn-primary"></a>'
});
Tourette has an useful set of callbacks that will help you to create awesome page tours easily:
onShow(landmark)
Called when the prompt is shown
Receives the current landmark object
onHide(landmark)
Called when the prompt is hidden
Receives the current landmark object
onStart(landmark)
Called when the tour is started
Receives the current landmark object
onExit(landmark)
Called when the tour has ended
Receives the current landmark object
onButton(landmark, action, button)
Called when a button with a custom action is clicked
Receives the current landmark, action and button objects
To receive callbacks, just pass an options object to the Tourette constructor:
var tourette = $.Tourette({
onExit: function(landmark) {
alert('You just ended the tour');
}
});
Tourette should work on major, modern browsers and has some mobile support. I've tested it on Firefox and Chrome/Opera. Internet Explorer should do fine, but it may have weird bugs.
TL;DR version, use a modern browser and you should be fine.
However, if you've found a bug, please open an issue. Or better yet, fix it and send me a pull request :)
Lead coder: biohzrdmx <github.com/biohzrdmx>
The MIT License (MIT)
Copyright (c) 2015 biohzrdmx
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.