The WebMaker studio generates thumbnail images for each of your pages so they can be easily identified and visualised.
To do this, the WebMaker Studio makes use of the PhantomJS library. Unfortunately, this library does not support all the latest CSS features, and so may not always provide the best representation of your pages.
If this is becoming a problem for you, it is possible to switch WebMaker to use the Puppeteer library instead, which does support updated standards, and will produce more accurate images.
The online WebMaker Studio at https://webmaker.hyfinity.com already uses this approach, but this is not yet included in the WebMaker installers due to the large file size.
To switch your existing WebMaker installation, please follow these steps:
You should take extra care when making changes to the WebMaker database to ensure you do not affect the routine operation of the Studio.
To do this, the WebMaker Studio makes use of the PhantomJS library. Unfortunately, this library does not support all the latest CSS features, and so may not always provide the best representation of your pages.
If this is becoming a problem for you, it is possible to switch WebMaker to use the Puppeteer library instead, which does support updated standards, and will produce more accurate images.
The online WebMaker Studio at https://webmaker.hyfinity.com already uses this approach, but this is not yet included in the WebMaker installers due to the large file size.
To switch your existing WebMaker installation, please follow these steps:
- Download and install Node and the Puppeteer library by following their installation instructions.
- Download the puppeteer_thumbnail_gen.zip file attached to this post and extract the script file it contains to a suitable location.
- Shut down the WebMaker Studio if it is running.
- Use a suitable Apache Derby compatible SQL client (Such as SQuirreL SQL) to connect to the studio database.
- Use the embedded Derby Driver with a class name of org.apache.derby.jdbc.EmbeddedDriver
- Use a connection URL of the form jdbc:derby:[webmaker install location] \users\webmaker-db
- Use a username and password of webmaker
- Execute the following statements to point the studio to use the new Puppeteer library and script:
- update webmaker.systemproperties set value = '<path to node executable>' where name = 'phantom-exe-location';
- update webmaker.systemproperties set value = '<path to puppeteer_thumbnail_gen.js>' where name = 'phantom-script-location';
- Disconnect from the database (as only one process can connect at a time when using embedded mode)
- Restart the studio, and the Puppeteer library should now be used to generate the thumbnail images.
You should take extra care when making changes to the WebMaker database to ensure you do not affect the routine operation of the Studio.
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