One of the objectives for this week was to research a Glossary plugin and to install it. I’m going to compare three, hopefully it will help to firm in my own mind what I want from a glossary.

The first is CM Tooltip Glossary from CreativeMindsSolutions there is a free version and a pro version, although the free version is limited to 500 terms. It will automatically create an index of terms, but I’m not sure I would use this as it might create a term for every field I’ve referenced in Maximo. Each term becomes a unique post, hmm, I’m not sure I want to create so many new posts. It controls whether the tooltip appears more than once, I’m pretty sure I need this.

The Pro version supports the use of custom post types, I do need to have a glossary for the Sensei post types for lessons, modules, and courses. It supports related posts and terms – this would be useful. It has 130 configurations, so presume fairly comprehensive. Oh, there is also a Pro+ version with over 240 configurations and, oh there are also eCommerce Features for you to purchase, yet another additional layer. Now I’m a bit worried, there are too many features, which might just make it difficult to use, and what if one of those features that I might later deem necessary is only in the Pro+ license. It looks to me as if the maker’s aim is to get you committed, and then you find you need more license.

The CM Tooltip Glossary only gets 4.2 out of 5 in the ratings, not great, with quite a few ratings of 1, although most of these are old. The Pro version is $36/year for one site, the Pro+ version is $59/year for three sites, I only have the one site. There doesn’t seem to be a lifetime price, so while it may work after your first year of support, who is to say that something might break if WordPress gets updated. Now price per year is looking more than I would have wished unless the free version will satisfy all my needs, which I doubt.

The second one to evaluate is Glossary from Codeat, this is the one being used on the SEO course, there is a Free version and a Pro version. It is Gutenberg compatible and allows terms to be grouped by category which for me would be useful. It would allow me to restrict this to custom post types, for example just the Sensei lessons, modules, or courses. You get a highlight and a hover over tooltip. You can associate links with the term, again potentially useful and there are widgets to search for the glossary categories and terms.

The Pro version has more styling options and allows a case sensitive search, this is potentially important as I may be referring to the ASSET table or an asset. It will only link the first occurrence of a term; this I think is a mandatory requirement for me because a term like asset could be used fifty or more times on a post, and I wouldn’t want a post with a huge number of links. Therefore, the free version doesn’t seem like it is an option for me.

Glossary creates an alphabetic list of terms (something I thought should happen with the free version). There are a few phrases in the descriptions which seem to indicate that a page might be created for each term, and it says, ‘Prevent term links from appearing on their own description page’. With potentially 500+ terms I do not want to create 500 additional pages each with a brief description, and if the free version does this, I think I’ll need the Pro version. It also supports multiple languages, not that I am thinking of entering this world.

The third option is WordPress.org Glossary by Automattic which is used on WordPress own sites. It is free, but very basic, the documentation only shows a tooltip example. I originally included this in the list as it was coming from Automattic, but as it is only tested to version 6.0.3 and has only 200 active installs, I think I will rule this out.

In the end I opted for Glossary from Codeat and the Pro version at $29.99/year – when I checked out, VAT (tax) was added. I decided on this for two reasons, I was put off by finding out there were so many pricing layers for CM Tooltip Glossary and a rating of 4.2 is not great. Glossary from Codeat had a 4.7 rating and is being used on the SEO course.

The installation was smooth and quick, I had installed the free version first. I had a little trouble with registering for Support, the verification code didn’t initially work. What I didn’t realise is that you need to use the Forgotten Password link. I didn’t think that was obvious as I never had a password in the first place.

I created my first Glossary term, highlighted that it should appear on Posts, and it appeared with its tool tip. Each Glossary term is a separate Post, but it is of a custom type that does not seem to interfere with other parts of my website. So, I don’t think I should have been worried about this when I was first evaluating the plugins. Having a custom post for each term does mean that there is the potential to turn each into a wiki page, by adding links, diagrams, images, etc.

By the time I had worked down to my third term – Location – I started to realise that I did need the Pro version. In one document titled Location Types and Location Systems it was highlighted many times. To overcome this there are several steps you need to take:

• You need separate terms for Location Types and Location Systems to distinguish from just Location. For me I soon realised I needed terms for Operating Location, Repair Location, Salvage Location, etc. i.e., a term for anything which naturally precedes or succeeds “location” to create a phrase.
• On the Location Type term, I needed to add Location Types in the field ‘Additional key terms for this definition’. The plural shares the same term, you can have multiple of these key terms separated by a comma.
• The term Location Types was highlighted several times and there are two settings from the Pro version which I did need to set, ‘Link only the first occurrence of all key terms’ and ‘Link only the first occurrence of all the term keys’. The first of these removed duplicates of Location Type, the second of these also removed duplicates of the plural Location Types, i.e., the other key terms that shared the glossary term used by the custom post.

I added a set of Glossary Categories to align with the same set of categories that I am using across the website, but only for the eight categories where I will write glossary terms. My thoughts here is that Maximo users may not be using some aspects of Maximo so they should be able to go to the glossary parts of Maximo which are relevant to them.

I added an excerpt to the four glossary terms, and I set the glossary category. If you have no excerpt, you get the first 60 characters of the term displayed, so an excerpt should always be required. In the Settings there is a set of parameters for the Excerpts. I changed ‘Limit the excerpt by words’ and I changed ‘Excerpt length in characters or words’ from 60 (characters) to 30 (words). I’ll need to find a way of placing a ‘More’ link when the term has more than just the same text as the excerpt.

Next up I wanted to play with the formatting of the term and its tooltip, which defaults to white writing on a black background, and which adds space to the left and right of the term.

• In the Settings for Tooltip section, the ‘Enable tooltips on terms’ was set to ‘Link and Tooltip’ I did try ‘Only Tooltip’ but this just removed the text colour when there was a term.
• What I didn’t like was the background highlighting which added padding to the left and right of the term which if the post were printed wouldn’t look right. In the Customizer tab I found ‘Remove padding from terms on front-end’, which did the trick.
• In ‘Tooltip style’ which is the shape of the tooltip there are four settings provided by the free version (Classic, Box, Line, Simple) and five added by the Pro version (Book, Fancy, Light, Material, Black). Classic is the default, but I liked Box. Book was also nice it seemed to appear from left to right with a little thicker edging on the right and bottom, but simple. Fancy had an animation, but all the text was in capitals. Light was too plain. I was now beginning to think that you could change the background and text colour, and so it was the shape which was the most important aspect. Material had rounded corners and a shadow which I liked. I didn’t like Black. I had another look at Box, Book, Light and Material now focusing on the shape, and I took a screen print of each. I settled on Material with a background colour of a cross between green and cyan with white lettering.
• The text shows the excerpt, and 30 words does not make the tooltip excessive in size. But I don’t have a more link which would hopefully launch the full text of the glossary term. Eventually I found the answer for this in the custom fields at the bottom of each term. The ‘What type of link?’ was set to ‘External URL’ and as no ‘Link to external URL’ was given nothing was shown. By changing the radio button to ‘Internal URL’ the ‘More’ link was shown. On a desktop you can’t navigate to the ‘More’ link because as soon as you move off the area of the term the tooltip closes, but it is enough for someone to realise that if they clicked rather than hovered, then they would be taken to the glossary term’s post.
• I didn’t particularly like the colour of the line to indicate the additional link especially as in the tool tip it was a sort of grey-red colour also the link was a thick grey line. This was overcome by making the colour ‘Key Term Text Style Settings’ the same colour as my website links, which for me was #007CBA. While the term had just one thicker line underneath to indicate a link (great styling), the ‘More’ button in the tooltip had unfortunately a thinner line with a thicker line below. So, I raised my first support ticket with Codeat.

I was on a bit of a roll, so next up was looking to create index pages based on the Glossary Categories. I had read that there was a Glossary Index Block. I added this to a Test page that I keep in draft and a few seconds later I had a glossary index, and you can filter this to use a Glossary Category.

The documentation in this area is I think a bit weak, there are some settings, and it seems to indicate that there is some automation to the creation of the index. After playing with the settings for a while I concluded that I needed a page which I called Glossary Index, added the Glossary Index Block (without a category) and published this. I won’t need category-based pages until I have sufficient terms to make navigation, of a single page tiresome.

I think using a separate page is the right approach, I’m not certain though and after a while I’ll come back to the documentation and see whether I can make sense of it. The page you create can’t have a slug called Glossary because this is already used by the plugin, it is performing a search for your glossary terms. The demo area provided by Codeat shows that they called their index page Glossary Index.

There is more to do on the glossary including how I can make more use of the custom posts. I should be able to highlight other terms and link to other glossary terms from these posts. I will want to add links to other articles that I’ve written over the years, and some terms may warrant a diagram, especially if one already exists elsewhere. My aim is to build out the glossary used by the existing YouTube videos and podcast episodes so that I add new glossary terms as part of the process of creating a new video.

I didn’t work on preparing the content for any video this week. I did finish the recording of the last few podcast episodes, including reworking the first two minutes of the one called Job Plans where I must have been standing too close to the microphone. These and the episodes I had edited last week have all been published and the transcripts checked. So, I now have 22 podcast episodes to go with the YouTube videos.

The fourth quiz was prepared, I’m still doing this as a regular post instead of using Sensei. I need to evaluate whether I would ever want to keep both and if I decide I don’t then I should only be working in Sensei going forward. If I decide I do want to retain both then I need to think whether I publish them in a manner that they don’t naturally appear on my website. Keeping them in draft format will soon become a pain.

I started to draft the skeleton of a set of lab exercises and How To videos that cover the same content as the Asset Management videos/podcasts. I’ll finish this next week as I have processed 11 of the 14 videos. Like the glossary I do want to catchup to the same position as I am on the videos, so that adding to this becomes part of the same weekly process. It will be more efficient to draft this while everything is fresh in mind.

The next step is to convert this to a set of tasks that the students will perform as part of a lab exercise. We had a new starter this week, someone with a bit of Maximo experience and she is already following the video, transcript, quiz and using these tasks to guide her when trying things on the Maximo training system. I will also use this to produce a set of video titles that may start with the term “How to….”. By focusing on a title, I think I will narrow the scope for the ‘How To’ video. Some bullets I’ve created for the lab exercises may become multiple ‘How To’ videos.

On Thursday I noticed that my website was using a different font and I wondered how this had occurred, hopefully not by one of the plugins. The font was the default font from the theme, one that I really didn’t like. Eventually after checking the changes, I had made to global styling I called the Happiness Engineers and found out that this was a bug which had affected multiple websites. Hopefully, they will correct this soon.

I did accomplish quite a lot this week, so what for next week, week 54?

• Record the next YouTube video, it won’t be long, but it will be a difficult one to explain and I think I might need to author an article first.
• Complete the set of Lab exercises / How To video descriptions for the 14 Asset Management subjects. The week after I’ll start to format these as Sensei tasks.
• Determine a set of “How To…” video titles as this will help to focus the lab exercises, some may be split. These “How To…” titles ought to be efficient regarding SEO.
• Continue to add terms to the Glossary (target 10-15) so that I can start to see whether any other issues appear. I’m thinking that if there are issues you may not see them until there are sufficient terms defined.
• Create the fifth quiz but decide whether I need them in current Post form as well as a Sensei quiz. In which case, how do I publish them silently.
• Download latest PowerDirector 365 and Camtasia versions as I’m going to start using these soon.
• Test the recording of the Lavalier microphone