Ever wanted to know if it’s possible to password protect your Articulate Storyline eLearning course? Now in this video, I’ll guide you through the different options and show you how to set up a simple password slide for your next Article Storyline project.
Password protect
If you search the internet to password protect your Articulate Storyline eLearning course, you’ll find a few forum topics on the eLearning Heroes website. Now I think that are basically two solutions. The first solution I want to show you in a moment and that is to create an input field with some triggers so a person has to fill in something and if it’s correct, he can go to the next page. But there’s one big disadvantage for this solution and that is that a user or users around him can see what he fills in in the password field. Now, if you don’t want this, Matthew Bibby has made another solution where he creates an external HTML file with a password field and in this solution, you can’t see the password. What I will do in this video, I’ll show you first, the simple solution and next to that I will talk through the solution that Matthew created on the internet and I also have linked to in the description below to his solution. Let’s start with our first solution.
Create a trigger
Now let’s go and create the simple solution. Now the first thing that I’m going to do is create a trigger that disables the next button on the slide. I’ll create a trigger here that says, change the state of the my next button to disabled when the timeline starts on this slide. Now a user can’t go to the next slide in an eLearning course. And the next thing I’m going to do is create an input field. I’ll go to insert here, go to the input fields and here choose for a text entry field. And I draw it on my slide. There is now a text entry field and I can say, fill in your password. And the next step is to add some triggers. In Articulate Storyline, every text entry field has a variable attached with and this is your text entry.
What I’m going to do now is create a new trigger and I’m going to change the state of the next button to normal. But I do this when a variable changes and the variable is text entry and now I’m going to check which will we fill in? For instance, if the filled in phrase in text entry is password. The password is password right now so if someone fills in password here, the next button will be available and the user can go to the next slide. Let’s check if this works. I’m now in Articulate Storyline preview mode and as you can see here at my next button is disabled. What I will do here, I’ll fill in my password. Password, and I have to do it correctly. I’ll enter it. And if I enter it, you’ll see now that the next button is available so user can go to the next page.
Now what you can do to make it a little bit better for a user is to create check button because user has to enter right now. And if he doesn’t enter the next button won’t be available. What we’ll do is close our preview and add a next button. Go to insert button and says, check here. And I will change this trigger so I’ll double click it and the trigger panel will open. This won’t be on variable chains, but button. Click one. What we’ll do is we changed the state of the next button to normal when the user clicks button one, that is this button. If text entry is value password.
Let’s do this. You see I’m in preview mode right now. My next button is disabled. I fill in password and I’ll check and you’ll see now that my next button is enabled now. What you also can do is create a warning message if the password wasn’t correctly. But what you saw, the only thing here is that the password is visible and if want that. And if you won’t want this, there is another solution for this and I want to show you the solution right now.
eLearning Heroes forum
Matthew created a PDF file, you can find it on the eLearning Heroes forum and I will also share the link to you in the comments below this video. And here you can see his solution. What he did, he opened Storyline and created a text variable called password and also a submit button. You can see here and next to that he created two slides, correct and incorrect. If the password is correct, you go to the correct slide. The password is incorrect, you go to the incorrect slide. I think this is very logical, but he has also a submit button, but he won’t use an import field from Articulate Storyline.
What he does, he creates a password field. What he do is he creates a file called password.html. You can also create it in for instance, Notepad and here you can find what must go in that HTML file. Doc type, it’s the email deck, a head deck, another head deck, a body deck and in the body you see an import with the type of password and the ID is pass. And because the type is password, the browser will show the asterixis so you won’t see what user fills in. And the ID will be used to see what’s happening for the password field because you have to know it in Articulate Storyline.
And now he has also done some JavaScript. Here you can find the JavaScript. If the password is this password, then it has to do something. Here, you see JavaScript with the variables from Articulate Storyline. And he retrieves the password that is filled in the password field and then he pushes the password field password variable back to Articulate Storyline. Here he shows you the complete field so you can copy this and paste it in your own HTML field and paste it in your Storyline project. It’s pretty easy, but you have to do something with HTML pages. And if you don’t want this, you can also use my solution. I’ll share the link to this document in the comments below.
This I think are the two best options to create password slides in your Articulate Storyline course. Now, I want to say a big thanks to Matthew that he created this and I hope to see you in the next video.
