Extension:GuidedTour - MediaWiki
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MediaWiki extensions manual
GuidedTour
Release status:
stable
Implementation
Special page
Page action
Description
Provide popup guided tour on wiki pages, and/or microsurveys.
Author(s)
Munaf Assaf, Terry Chay, Matt Flaschen, Pau Giner, Ori Livneh, Rob Moen, S Page, Sam Smith, Moiz Syed, Luke Welling
Latest version
Continuous updates
MediaWiki
1.32+
PHP
5.4+
Hooks used
BeforePageDisplay
MakeGlobalVariablesScript
RedirectSpecialArticleRedirectParams
ResourceLoaderRegisterModules
Licence
Apache License 2.0
Download extension
Git
Browse repository
GitHub
Gerrit code review
Git commit log
Download source tarball
Internet Explorer compatibility: none for 6, partial for 7.
Translate the GuidedTour extension
if it is available at translatewiki.net
Issues
Open tasks
Report a bug
The
GuidedTour
extension provides a framework for creating "guided tours," or interactive tutorials for MediaWiki features.
Tours typically walk a user through some standard workflow (like editing an article or uploading an image) and are implemented as a series of dialog boxes that tell the user where to click and what to do next.
Tours are backed by JavaScript and PHP code that can monitor the user's progress, check their understanding, and offer advice and encouragement.
Guided tours are an effective means for breaking down complex tasks into a series of simple, discrete sub-tasks, and for giving the user the experience and confidence needed to repeat the workflow for similar tasks in the future.
Tours may also be used to implement
interactive surveys
GuidedTour was developed by the (former)
Growth
team.
It is partly based on
Optimize.ly's Guiders
library.
GuidedTour originally started at
WMF Tech Days 2012
Note that there are some
performance concerns
with using this extension.
Install and use GuidedTour on your wiki
Test that it worked by calling a page with
tour=test
appended to the URL. For example:
and move the extracted
GuidedTour
folder to your
extensions/
directory.
Developers and code contributors should install the extension
from Git
instead, using:
cd
extensions/
git
clone
Add the following code at the bottom of your
LocalSettings.php
file:
wfLoadExtension
'GuidedTour'
);
Done
– Navigate to
Special:Version
on your wiki to verify that the extension is successfully installed.
To use guided tours, you should...
Write a real tour on a page in the MediaWiki namespace. It must be named MediaWiki:Guidedtour-tour-
tour name
.js, for example MediaWiki:Guidedtour-tour-mytour.js
Call your intended page with tour=mytour appended to the URL. For example:
, or ?tour=test for the example above.
To style the output, either edit the css file in the modules directory or add overrides to MediaWiki:Common.css
For security reasons, tours cannot run on some pages, including login, account creation, user preferences, and password reset.
Background
Our communities were once limited to using static wiki pages, templates, and other functions to build tutorials and tours of any kind.
As rich as tools like
Wikipedia:Tutorial
might be, they interrupt the user and force them to go to a separate Web page.
They are also quite long; most documentation about Wikipedia would take quite some time to read in full.
User experience
Interactive guided tours provide a simple, step-by-step guide through a feature set without interrupting the user.
Guided tours don't dominate the screen, are dismissible, and walk the user through a task directly.
Guided tours are also ideally something that one can return to at any time when you need it.
Each step in a guided tour is called a "guider".
Description of guider elements
Title
Names the current step. If the title is the beginning of the tour, you may need to use it to describe the tour as a whole. If your tour title is more than one line, it's too long.
Body text
Describes the current step. If you make additional points unnecessary for the user to understand how to move to the next step, you're saying too much. Guided tours are effective not just because tooltips point at things, but because they limit instructional text to what is immediately necessary, rather than trying to dump paragraphs of documentation on a user all at once.
Buttons
tour buttons are for actions, typically progressing the user to the next step. By default, guided tour buttons use the
progressive
class from the
mediawiki.ui
library. It is a poor practice to provide multiple action buttons, e.g.
Start tour
plus
Next
. Choose one action you want the user to take in response to a tour step, focus on completion of that action. Never use the action button for ending the tour (unless the user is actually at the end), since this muddles whether the primary action buttons is for continuing the tour or ending it (positive vs. negative action). If your guider step points to an additional action you want the user to take (e.g.
Edit
or
View history
), it is a bad idea to have the tour button perform this action for them. Instead, point to the element you wish a user to use, and encourage them to give it a try, so they learn how to use a function as they normally would.
Close button (X)
provides an obvious element for dismissing a tour, as opposed to simply closing a single guider, which can be done by an outside click or hitting
Esc
. If the user clicks this close button, it should end the tour across pages, and will clear the associated tour from the user's cookies.
Location
Guiders can be positioned as either a "central overlay" or an "attachment". "Attachments" are positioned next to specific page elements (for example, a link or tab) using CSS selectors. The position of the guider relevant to the page element is specified with orientations such as topLeft, top, topRight, rightTop, right, etc. (
See details
Description of guider behavior
A short video of the 'firstedit' tour, which shows basic behavior like callouts, animations, and more
Keep in mind the following default behaviors for guided tours:
If a guider is not visible (i.e. above or below the fold) for a user, the browser will scroll the user to the location of the guider. You can choose to disable this for individual steps.
Guiders animate in to view by default, unless it requires scrolling to see. Animations can be disabled if you are writing a tour.
If a user has launched multiple tours, the most recent tour started will always be displayed, if there is a conflict.
You can force a tour to "stick" to a particular page. If you have not defined this behavior in your tour, a tour in progress might keep showing across pages. For instance, if you have a tour that points to the "Save" button, a tour that is in progress might point at this element every time until the user moves to the next step or dismisses the tour.
A guider will flip horizontally to the left or right, if it would otherwise be cut off by the width of the user's browser. You can also disable this for each step.
Designing a tour
If you want to make your own guided tour, here are some maxims to consider.
Choose a primary goal for the tour. What do you want users to learn by the end?
Know who your audience is before you start, and what their goals and experiences are. What knowledge about a process do they have before starting your tour?
Plot the necessary steps, focusing on the one action or key takeaway for each step. Less is more. The more steps in your tour, the more likely a user is to abandon your tour in the middle.
Tours can be started via a link or button within a page, or automatically via a cookie. How you start a tour has a big impact on the potential for delivering tours that interrupt or annoy users, so choose carefully.
Let the steps and their associated actions guide the design of the tour. For example, if you want users to edit as one step, pointing directly to the edit button is the obvious and efficient thing to do. A poor alternative would be to have a center-aligned window with an image and description of the edit tab. The strength of tooltip-based tours is that you can show users what to do, instead of simply describing it.
Choose titles, body text, and images only after you have plotted all steps in your tour.
List of tours
GuidedTour
The following tours are currently packaged with the extension, and are thus available on any wiki where GuidedTour is installed.
Test
- Simple tour to show what tours can do (
Code
demonstration
).
First edit
- A tour showing you how to make your first edit using the
Wikitext
Code
demonstration
) editor or
VisualEditor
Code
demonstration
).
On-wiki
The Wikipedia Adventure
- this project is a pilot of a game-like experience for learning the ropes, hosted at
The Wikipedia Adventure
on English Wikipedia (
Level 1 Code
).
WikiMOOC #2
, french MOOC about Wikipedia using 17 tours (marked as
interactive tutorial
on the
table of content
).
List of all the starting pages:
fr:Category:Tutoriel WikiMOOC 2017
List of all the corresponding JS scripts:
fr:Category:Guided tour
Aide:Wikipédia Pas à Pas
, a re-use of these tutorials in a
standalone
version.
Feel free to add your own tours to the appropriate list above.
Find more examples by searching for "prefix:MediaWiki:Guidedtour-tour", e.g.
at Enwiki
Tour ideas
Potential tours include nearly all tasks currently covered by help documentation in Wikimedia projects.
We're starting with Wikipedia, and with tasks that are most common or attractive to new registered editors, since they are a group most likely to need a guided tour of an interface or activity.
Page creation
'Your user page' - what it's for, etc.
How to add/edit a reference
How to add an image
Watchlist - what are the important elements of it, how to add stuff to it, etc.
Process helpers: how to request a move, how to file a deletion request, etc.
Please add to the list!
Technical documentation
Building and launching tours
You launch the guided tour
tourname
on a page by adding
tour=tourname
to the query string of a URL linking to it, or by calling
mw.guidedTour.setTourCookie( tourName )
to set a cookie for the next page load.
You can also launch it immediately with
mw.guidedTour.launcher.launchTour
(requires only the
ext.guidedTour.launcher
module).
You can set the cookie from the server if appropriate too.
This will cause the GuidedTour extension to load both the code to display the tour and the tour itself.
You define your tour in a JavaScript file in your extension, or in the MediaWiki namespace (MediaWiki:Guidedtour-tour-
tourname
.js).
Much of this file simply names the elements of each step of the tour — a titlemsg, descriptionmsg, a 'next' button, etc.
Individual wikis can override the CSS at MediaWiki:Guidedtour-custom.css.
To
add a tour by editing your wiki
, see
Write an on-wiki tour
. Any local wiki administrator can do this.
To
bundle a tour with your extension
, see
Write an extension tour
. This requires access to the code repository for your wiki and the right to install extensions.
For API documentation, see
This extension is being used on one or more
Wikimedia projects
. This probably means that the extension is stable and works well enough to be used by such high-traffic websites. Look for this extension's name in Wikimedia's
CommonSettings.php
and
InitialiseSettings.php
configuration files to see where it's installed. A full list of the extensions installed on a particular wiki can be seen on the wiki's
Special:Version
page.
This extension is included in the following wiki farms/hosts and/or packages:
Miraheze
Retrieved from "
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