Dokeos 1.8.5 Quick Reference Sheets – Take 2

Here are some more of my reference sheets (one on plugins/tools development and one on security).

dokeos-185-tools-and-plugins-quickref

dokeos-185-security-quickref

I think with that I cover all basic questions a new developer might have, except the system to install/upgrade a Dokeos install (changing SQL queries) and the way to actually query the database using the Database class. After that, some other sheet to explain how sessions work (and how to use them fully on the coding side) would be nice. This would make a set of 5 sheets that would explain almost all the intricacies of Dokeos… nice!

To avoid looking for the other post, here is a link to the first Quick Reference Guide.

(spanish version of this post )

Installing IE 6 and 7 under Ubuntu Hardy Heron – Python GTK error

Although Tatanka’s page makes it easy enough to install IE6 & 7 under Ubuntu 8.04, you might fall upon a few problems when trying it if you don’t have a Python developer’s background ;-)

When trying to install, I got an obscure Python GTK error (which, sadly, I forgot to copy-paste at the time). Following only mi intuition like a true Jedi, I launched something like

apt-get install python-gtk2-dev

That installed a incredibly long list of libraries related to Python, but in the end I just launched the ./ie4linux script again and it all worked fine.

Note that to install IE7, you need to click on “Advanced” in the installer and select IE7 at the bottom of the little window.

Dokeos Latinoamérica en charla en San Borja

Mientras es un evento privado (organizado por Macro Editorial), mañana voy a dar una charla sobre Dokeos y los vendajes del e-learning en Perú adelante de 500 profesores y directores de colegios y universidades limeños.

El evento es la primera “Conferencia Internacional”, y de lo que veo voy a ser el ùnico elemento “internacional” del mismo. Divertido. Es en el Centro de Convenciones INICTEL.

Bueno, son todos clientes más o menos de Macro, y voy a presentar por 35 minutos, explicando a toda esta buena gente que es el e-learning y como empezar a usarlo en sus instituciones. Espero que todo se pasara bonito. Todo el mundo me esta dando su confianza ahí, como si siempre lo hacía bien…

Parece que no tienen un sitio web para el evento…

The item_property table

I’ve been working for 4 years on the Dokeos code now, and that item_property table bugged me more than once. It’s a clunky, unclear table which holds pretty much all the visibility rights of all the resources in a course. It’s quite impractical to deal with visibility in itself, mostly because it only allows for a visible/invisible flag (which is insufficient for most finely-grained permissions systems), and because it holds a super long list of other attributes that you always have to set, and that are never used in the end. Or so I thought…

Well, I never realized that, actually, the “notifications” feature (the one showing an icon next to your course to tell you whether there is something new in this course) uses this table to get, easily, a list of the latest modifications in the course, over all items available. Well that’s a discovery, because in this case (I want to say “only”), it makes a lot of sense.

Food for thought in the future… Don’t criticize a table structure until you know it fully enough.

Just another speech

Tomorrow night I will be giving a speech about Dokeos and the e-learning in Peru to about 450 to 500 teachers and school directors. This is my biggest audience ever, and I must admit I’m a bit stressed (it’s like being a star, really… 500 people is almost an opera audience).

This will happen in San Borja (in Lima), at the “Centro de Convenciones INICTEL” at 4.30pm (my speech is at 6.05pm if I remember well).

The speech will be about a basic presentation (30 to 45 minutes) about what the e-learning can do for Peru, and in particular what *Dokeos* can do to enable people to integrate e-learning easily in their colleges, schools and universities.

Only 10 days since campus cleanup, and yet…

I just checked the statistics quickly for the campus.dokeos.com portal. We’ve cleaned up the portal completely on the 12th of October, and yet… we have already reached 1400 courses and 13000 users.

campus.dokeos.com is provided as a free service to host courses inside Dokeos, but without any implied guarantee, so we strongly recommend you keep a backup (you can do that in your course options) at least once a month.

Migración de campus.dokeos.com y problemas resueltos

El Domingo 12 de Octubre hemos limpiado el Campus Libre (http://campus.dokeos.com) como documentado en varios lugares, y indicado con mucha anticipación.

Varios problemitas ocurrieron tras esta migración, mayormente porque unos cambios de configuración muy específicos al campus no habían sido realizados.

Primero, unos docentes mencionaron que no era posible de subir archivos de backup de cursos. Por supuesto, sabiendo que el limite de subida de archivos había sido puesto a 2MB, se entiende que subir un archivo de backup de 20MB habría podido ser problemático. Esto fue resuelto el Martes pasado.

Segundo, otros docentes mencionaron que no era posible de subir archivos en los cursos. Hemos pensado bastante tiempo (una semana) que era problemas por el limite de tamaño de subida de archivos, pero era un problema de filtro sobre las extensiones. Una docente mencionó, por fin, el mensaje de error específico que retornaba el sistema, y desde ahí nos dimos cuenta de lo que era. El filtro funciona por whitelist, y ahora acabamos de agregar los documentos MS-Office y OpenOffice.org

Normalmente todo debería quedarse funcionando bien ahora…

Primer módulo Dokeos para Drupal

En resultado de una de las reuniones del grupo Drupal Perú, una primera versión del módulo que permitirá de usar Dokeos en conjunto con Drupal fue desarrollada en un trabajo combinado de Fernando y yo mismo (bajo la vigilencia de Isaac).

Pueden seguir el progreso directo por el sitio del módulo.

Ahora, solo recoje la lista de cursos abiertos al público que se encuentran dentro de la instalación de Dokeos ligada, y aparece como un bloque en Drupal.

Vista previa del modulo Dokeos de Drupal

Dokeos – Drupal module, first version available

Yesterday I have commited an additional service into Dokeos (called “courses_list”) which works in SOAP and REST, will be available in Dokeos 1.8.6, and which will enable a new Drupal module (also created yesterday by fellow Peruvian developer DevelCuy), the Dokeos e-learning module, to connect to Dokeos (using the Dokeos API key) to get a list of currently (publicly) available courses.

This is just a little step in the right direction, but the idea is, in the near future, to be able to integrate more of Dokeos information into a Drupal block, so that any university or large organization using Drupal can choose to display information about what is going on inside their Dokeos installation (for example, calendar of events, new information in courses, etc).

I took the opportunity to request an official module maintainer permission to the Drupal CVS admins, which already got accepted, and have a series of improvements in mind for the module in the future. It might become a very large module in time, depending on the efforts we put in it (which will depend on the demand, as usual).

I see this little step as a much more useful step than the integration of LMS inside virtual reality worlds like SecondLife (which still seems sooo impractical to me for beginner-level digital learners).

The Dokeos API Key mentionned above is an hexadecimal characters hash available in the main/inc/conf/configuration.php file as $_configuration[‘security_key’] inside any installation of Dokeos. This uniquely represents the campus. Although the security check on this key right now is *very* weak, this is one of the first fixes I will apply to the module.

campus.dokeos.com cleaned up

Sunday 13th of October 2008, we emptied the campus.dokeos.com portal, after a two-weeks long announcement on the portal homepage to explain how to backup a course and restore it in the new portal. Yet, as planned, we’ve already received about 15 requests to restore courses in just one day, most of them from Latin America, as usual (I might be living there, I never get used to the fact that these people listen much less to what one says – this is a generality, of course, there are *many* exceptions).

Anyway, cleaning the campus was due to one main reason: we reached 32000 courses, and due to that persisting flaw in Dokeos (that is to have one database per course), which will be fixed in Dokeos 2.0, well we reached the maximum number of databases on the system and couldn’t create any more. This, however, is almost impossible to reach on a real-use portal, because 32000 courses is simply unmanageable by whichever organisation.

Cleaning the campus has the double effect of allowing users to start anew with a fresh, light and lightspeed campus, and allowing our server to take a deep breath. This will also cut down upgrade times considerably in the future and might allow us to use it as a confirmation of the fact that UTF-8 works in Dokeos (there are still potentially a few bugs, but we can fix them little by little).