Development
Wed, 23/04/2008 - 10:53

Dokeos - Drupal link planning

[digg=http://digg.com/programming/Dokeos_Drupal_link_in_the_making] I had an interesting talk with Marco Antonio Villegas Vega the morning of 19th April 2008 about a possible link between Drupal and Dokeos in the medium-term future (a few months). The idea is that Dokeos lacks one thing that Moodle has (but that we don't want in Dokeos itself): the possibility to build a widget-based website with your content. Dokeos has a strong structure, which Moodle lacks of, making it simpler for new users to get around and learn. And learning is about the major thing users do in Dokeos, so if they can't understand how the platform works, they're in a bad position to start learning the real stuff. So, Dokeos wants to remain like that, but at the same time a considerable amount of clients are asking us to better integrate Dokeos into their website or web portal. The idea is thus to start small, by first providing a Drupal module that will allow user to:
  • log directly and automatically (if using openID at first) into Dokeos from their Drupal site
  • get a list of events from their personal agenda in Dokeos (and possibly display it in the Events module in Drupal)
  • get a list of direct links to courses they're subscribed to (will open in a new window though, to let them continue using Drupal)
  • get a list of certificates (more a Business Network feature)
  • get a list of documents from inside the courses, to which they have access (will also open in a new window)
Dokeos would then become almost invisible for the most frequent interactions (open documents, check agenda and announcements), and would remain as a separate window/tab for the most thorough interactions. This would most certainly imply starting to use web services as a largely-implemented feature. To do this, I've been thinking for quite a long time about integrating PECL's package SCA_SDO which provides a nice way to re-use existing functions to provide web-services. This would hugely reduce implementation costs for Dokeos while providing the web services we need quickly and efficiently. What do you think about it? Don't hesitate to leave your comments, it's still in discussion...

Comments

Hi,

This is definitely a step in the right direction! I just looked over Dokeos for a project which requires a custom Flex interface which I'll bridge through SCA, and really wanted to use Dokeos because the codebase is so clean. I have, however, settled on ILIAS because it supports complex user/group interactions and already exposes its services through classes which are then mangled to work through nuSOAP. I've stripped the nuSOAP cruft off and now have only to add proper comments, convert a few DTDs to XSDs, and get through my last bug with SCA.

So keep it up! ILIAS is pretty crufty and I'd love to be able to look forward to a re-implementation of this system with Dokeos. I would need more management functionality to be exposed, but listings are a start.

You might check out ilias3webservicesoapclasses for inspiration..

Didn't like NuSoap either (tried it for another project). Didn't work with PHP5, then most of the code was difficult to find out. I'm surprise that you find the Dokeos codebase clean though, I still think it's a mess (even if we have improved that considerably over the last year).
Anyway, I'll put an update when something starts about this.

Hi,

I tried to install the dokeos/drupal alpha module but it crashed my test drupal site...

Maybe I'm not installing it correctly, but there is almost nothing by way of an installation document...

Would it be possible to post a step by step install process so that I can try out the module? I'm sure that I must be doing something wrong with the dokeos module which is causing errors on my site...

Thanks,

Ronen

Submitted by YW on Wed, 11/02/2009 - 13:44

Permalink

Hi Ronen,

Sorry about the crash. To avoid it, you can remove the call to the dsm() function in dokeos.module, or install the "devel" module (whichever you feel is the best). We are still working on the first release of the module, so unless you are already a Drupal module developer, I would recommend you wait a little bit longer. I will get into this a little bit more after 1.8.6 stable is released.

Hi ywarnier,

Thanks for the quick response...

Do you have an idea of when the first release of the module might be??

I'm currently setting up a site for my students and I'd love to have the drupal/dokeos integration when I launch the site within a week or two...

I'll try your suggestion of removing the function to prevent the crash, but it would be great to have a stable version of the module...I think the idea of integrating the Drupal and Dokeos is excellent...the best of both worlds so to speak...

I am not a Drupal code developer, although I am quickly learning lots about PHP, LMSs and CMSs...I love Dokeos by the way. I constantly try to show it off to my colleagues and push its use whenever I can. By the way, I did install the 1.8.6 beta and so far it seems reasonably well behaved...

Thanks again for a great product. Your work and effort is greatly appreciated.

Ronen

Thanks for the compliments. We should be releasing a stable version of the module (simulaneously at least in Drupal 5 and 6 versions) before the end of March, but there is nothing pressing us so far (we all have a lot of work to do apart from that).