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Manual installation of applications

panayotis edited this page Aug 24, 2019 · 5 revisions

If you would like to use free software applications that are not pre-installed in the MAZI toolkit, the process is rather straightforward:

In the "Applications" menu, at the end of the page there is a "+" button that allows you to add in the interface a manually (through ssh) installed application (e.g., it could be as simple as an html page, better place in a separate folder).

Note that application should be installed as root user at the /var/www/html/ directory, e.g., /var/www/html/myapp/. And the URL entry of the input form for adding an application (when clicking "+"), should be http://local.mazizone.eu/my-app/.

Then you can add one or more instances of this application, as with the pre-installed ones (your new application's name will appear in the list of applications available for adding an instance).

Useful applications

Examples of useful applications that you could consider manually installing:

[Feel free to add your own suggested application]

Advanced features

If you have the appropriate technical skills you can think of creating appropriate "frameworks" in which the different applications are presented.

A very flexible tool that you can use to improve the user experience in your MAZI Zone is the so-called "iframe". An iframe allows to place a whole application inside a wider page. This helps to provide "context". For example, in the Figure below an etherpad application was placed on the top of a background image to pass the message that people should type in the Etherpad what they imagine that people in the depicted demonstration wanted to say.

Etherpad in an iframe

Figure: An Etherpad application with a background image as the splash page