February has been a planning and sales month. We've been very busy answering an enormous quantity of requests for quotes, one of them being to embed Chamilo into a Joomla site (which we have already done in the past, but not the same way), another one being the building of a multi-sources collaboration system built on Drupal.
Here are a few projects that we would like to present to you:
Advanced PHP Course
We had been very busy preparing an advanced PHP course for Perú, with the idea of uniting the 5 only Zend certified engineers in Peru to teach a 120 hours curriculum. However, even the incredible value, a Flash game and a lot of e-mails sent didn't help us reach our limit of a minimum of 15 participants. This has taken a very hard toll on us as we expected to be able to play a major role in the improvement of the PHP software engineering quality in this country. Nevermind... we'll try again later.
National Education Organization
Although we aren't allowed to give the name here, we built a web application for an education organization that wants to control the progress of the national regions in the implementation of common procedures. The project is not finished yet, but they can already input their values through a pre-mashed Excel spreadsheet that we parse and of which we use the data to print beautiful dynamic graphics of which they can control the access and the additional information. We hope we'll be able to show that online at some point.
Installing PHP apps remotely through NetViewer, and connecting to Oracle
We hate working on Windows, so we had a particular chill when we learnt we would have to install a PHP, Apache and MySQL server through NetViewer, but in the end everything went well and it was just a matter of hours before the whole stuff was setup. We had a few bugs due to our application using JQuery stuff that weren't well supported by IE7, but then (even if it wasn't related) we fixed that as well. The whole system also had to connect to Oracle for GIS features that we implemented, so we learnt that Oracle Spatial 9 and Oracle Locator XE 11 bear a few differences in terms of declaring the MDSYS.SDO_GEOMETRY fields (i.e. you have to put MDSYS in Spatial)
Chamilo project progress
The Chamilo association organization hasn't been progressing much this month, mostly due to administrative decisions taking some time. However, we have gathered candidates for the first board of directors and delegates for various functions. The software project, on the other side, has been leaping forward. We have set up a development site at http://chamilodev.beeznest.com where you can try out the latest features. These include full UTF-8, timezones, dashboard for the HR director and attendance sheets. Stay tuned. First alpha released planned for March...
Contributing to FLOSS
As usual, we have hosted local communities meetings in the Lima offices this month, with also the first local meeting for Chamilo planned for the 27th of March. Our team participated, as spectators this time, to the first MAOW (Mozilla Add-Ons Workshop) in Lima. It was great and we learnt a few nice tricks to get Firefox extensions up and running. Thanks to Mozilla Perú for this great opportunity!
