greetings - Canvas newbie, looking for design/layout advice - iframes or vanilla?

scottrlooney
Community Explorer

hey there folks! i'm Scott! just joined after lurking around for a bit of time searching for answers to questions. i'm a Canvas newbie, using the open source Community version from about March of 2017 which is running well more or less. i'm an instructor for game audio looking to create my own paid-for online curriculum for schools, teachers, and students, and since Canvas had been mentioned a number of times by other teachers, and i was less than impressed by Moodle, i thought i'd give it a try.

so, overall probably one of the most annoying things is the editor. not being about to wrap text around pictures especially seems like it would be basic 101, and sure i can muck around with html/css to get it to work, but would prefer not doing that if possible.

second, it seems like there's been a sea change in the included JQuery-based widgets like accordions which are being deprecated in favor of, well, what appears to be nothing, or rather, you get to use your own JQuery library that you install and then can use as you wish. but there's no integration with the TinyMCE-based (i'm guessing) Rich Content Editor.

so, since this community is somewhat concerned on good visual design for their courses, and i have no money to pay and no time or desire to hack CSS every time i want to put in a page with a widget or text flow around pictures, i'm wondering if using iframes is generally a better way to go? i've seen a few posts on this front and it seems to work pretty well. i was already using them to embed Youtube vids (my version is a little older than the updated Rich Content Editor, so i don't have a button for that one). and i've also checked out H5P and have plans to use it at some point once the first version of the course is completed.

curious about a few things on iframes:
1. can the iframe reference be secure? in other words, could you pass a key inside the iframe code to a server that would need it? i was thinking of creating the layout content in WordPress and iframing pages that way, but i'd rather someone not be able to open the iframe reference publicly.

2. can iframes be embedded in other iframes? is that even possible? i was thinking there might be an occasion when i would call an iframe on say, a Wordpress page, and that page would itself call an iframe. i'm suspecting this might be problematic.

3. if an iframe required JQuery to display a widget would it be able to get the rendering of that data from the iframe reference (the WordPress page in this example)? or is it dependent on the local machines configuration, like if you required Flash to play an SWF file embedded and it wasn't there?

4. has anyone created courses in which all text and media content was iframe based, and the 'page' was more or less a placeholder for the iframe? the structure, quizzes, etc would all be based and designed in Canvas, but the media and text would all be called remotely.

any advice greatly appreciated!