I’ve recently developed an e-learning portal for my institute. After an extensive online research and trial on several other e-learning platforms, I’ve settled down on MOODLE which stands for Modular Object Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment. MOODLE proves to be the best e-learning platforms which is also an opensource (I’m an avid opensource fan) – meaning, it’s free (under GPL).

The purpose of this post is to share with you a “horrifying” experience in the development of this portal. Now, the e-coursewares were developed using Powerpoints and I’ve bought a software PPT2Flash Pro to convert the Powerpoints to Flash .swf files for embedding into MOODLE. It works seamlessly when I use my primary browser, Firefox, to view the embedded Flash. To my horror, many of my colleagues are using Internet Explorer and they claimed they can’t view the content. I first disregard this as I thought it could be some settings in their IE that caused this “glitch”. But when 6 of my colleagues claimed they can’t view the Flash, that’s where the red flag was raised.

I combed through MOODLE forums and search all over Google to find out why IE can’t view those Flash in MOODLE. The horror kicks in when I saw some news online that due to the infamous Eolas lawsuit (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eolas) on IP regarding embedded thingy, IE was unable to autoplay/activate embedded object.

If you’re a webmaster and you’re facing the same dire situation of not seeing .swf in IE, fret not. I’ve spent hours to test out many ways to play, in this case, .swf in MOODLE and I’ve solved the issue. The answer is SWFObject found in code.google.com (http://code.google.com/p/swfobject/). Just go through the documentation (yes, I know it’s seems daunting) and follow the steps to make .swf viewable in IE. The good news is – it works!

So what is the essence of this post? As webmaster, you really got to do 100% UAT (user acceptance test) on both Firefox as well as IE (and possibly also Google Chrome).

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Filed under: Web Development

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