Introducing Avalance: A landslide presentations theme

Evan and I are giving a joint Zend Framework 2 tutorial at the PHPNW12 and ZendCon conferences this year and, consequently, we needed a way to create the presentation collaboratively, ideally using a text based system which we could store in git.

There are plenty of HTML5/JS based solutions out there and we decided on landslide which is a python based markdown -> HTML presentation system. However, I really didn’t like any of the default themes and Evan wasn’t impressed with the JavaScript, so we wrote Avalanche, a new theme for landslide. By default, it’s very clean, which is intentional as we expect people will want to override as they create their own look.

We’ve created two examples:

(click on the image and then press ‘h’, for help)

As landslide is a build system, you create the presentation in markdown like this and then “render” it to html using a config file to set up useful parameters which control the build. You then type landslide presentation.cfg to render the html file. One thing that we like about landslide is that there is an option to embed everything into the one file. This means that the single html file has everything you need for your presentation. However, if your presentation is very image-heavy, this can cause problems, so we’re working on a solution that embeds everything but the images. Also, the slides are written to be 1024px by 768px, but will scale using CSS to whatever size is required, which is useful.

We think Avalanche provides an excellent starting point for your creating your own style for presentation slides. If you’re interested in it, please visit the github page and have a play. When you find bugs, please report them and consider including a patch :)