Appendix C: Workflow Overview

Overview

This page provides an overview of the workflow and folder layout that we recommend. The folder layout that we show here supports the suggested workflow.

Many of the instructions on this website assume that you are following these suggestions. You don't have to follow this approach, but if you don't you'll need to do some mental translation to adapt our instructions to your situation.

The Main Language Mentor Folder

We suggest that you have a main Language Mentor folder located in some location, like My Documents, where it will be regularly backed up. (You do make regular backups, right?)



The Language Mentor folder should contain a Lesson Development folder and a Publish Staging folder.


The Lesson Development Folder

The Lesson Development folder contains one folder for each lesson that you develop. This is where you create and edit the lessons' audio and XML files. We call these "lesson development folders."



Individual lesson development folders each contain a "wav" folder which contains "source" audio files in WAV format. These are the files that you create and modify using an audio editor.



The lesson development folders also each contain a lesson XML file...



... and MP3 format audio files. You create these files when you publish the lesson by batch converting the WAV format files in the "wav" folder. You repeat this process and recreate these files each time you publish a new version of your lesson.




The Publish Staging Folder

The Publish Staging folder contains your library folders, organized in whatever way you choose to organize them. The important thing to understand about this folder is that it's a local copy of the content that you put onto your web server. Each time you change the contents of your server you do this by putting the content here, then copying the changes to the server using FTP.



However you choose to organize your server's contents, it will contain one or more library folders. Each library folder contains a library XML file and one or more subfolders.



The subfolders each contain a lesson list XML file.



They will also contain lesson files - one lesson XML file and one lesson ZIP file for each lesson. These files are typically created within the lesson development folders, then copied into a lesson library subfolder.





Publishing To A Web Server

The publishing process is explained in detail on our Publish page.


Questions?

If you have questions about the lesson creation process, please contact us on our Creating Lessons forum. We're here to help.