Using Coloring Books

You can group your My Coloring Book coloring pages into coloring books.  The user can then go to the previous or next page in the book by pressing the appropriate button.

For each page you can add text captions and sound-tracks, and specify overlays for enhanced visuals. 

You can also determine what happens at the start and end of the coloring book.

The Coloring Book File

Create an xml file which lists each of the pages in your coloring book, for an example look at the "book1.xml" file included in your installation.

The root node should be <book>.

You can have an optional <settings> node, and then one or more <page> nodes which define the source for each page, an optional overlay, plus a caption and sound-tracks.

Here is a simple example...

<book>
<page source="chicks.gif">Example caption</page>
<page source="monkey.gif" track="monkey.mp3"/>
<page source="unicorn.gif" overlay="unicorn.png"/>
</book>

Save the book file with a name, such as book1.xml, into the mbc/page/ subdirectory along with the images.

Settings

The coloring book can have an optional settings node, which controls what happens on the first and last pages.  See Coloring Book Settings for more details.

Text Captions

Each page in the coloring book can display a text caption. The caption can include basic formatting, and also links to other pages.  See Coloring Page Captions for details.

Sound Tracks

Each page can have a sound track that plays.  The track can be played once, or repeated many times.  There is also the option to have a different track that plays before going to a new page.  See Coloring Page Sound-tracks for details.

Linking to the Book

You link to the book much as you would a simple page, for example...

/mcb/mcb.html#b=book1.xml

You can also specify which page in the book if you want to...

/mcb/mcb.html#b=book1.xml&p=monkey.gif

Reloading on a new page

For some sites, especially ones using advertising, it can be desirable to reload each time the user goes to a new coloring page.  You can do this using a setting in the config file.  See My Coloring Book: General Configuration.

Advanced: Using a script

Instead of using a static XML file, you can use a script to generate the XML.  This is useful if you want to store your coloring page details in a database, or generate a random coloring page, etc.

To use a script you just pass the script URL instead of the XML file name.  For example, you might use a PHP script which looks for all the gif files in a directory and then returns these as XML.

The php would have to be in the "page/" subdirectory, and you could use it like this...
/mcb/mcb.html#b=book.php

You can find more details in URL parameters for My Coloring Book.