Development

It's been ages since I first thought I should publish a quick reference sheet for Dokeos developers. It's now done. It's a first version but I think it will be really useful to new Dokeos developers. It is already useful for me (particularly for $httpHeadXtra and $htmlHeadXtra), so I don't doubt that bit. Dokeos 1.8.5 Quick Reference Sheet It is published under the Creative Commons BY-SA license (Paternity, Share-Alike) and I have the SVG format locally, so just ask me for it if you want to extend it.

We've been looking for something like this for a week now, and someone just sent me a link (after I asked for something like this on the php-general mailing-list). http://www.phpclasses.org/browse/package/2544.html I just wish they would have sent me that link a few days earlier... (but am happy they didn't do that a few days later).

Herodoto is joining the Dokeos development team as an independent (and distant) developer today. He will be in charge of integrating the wiki tool, under my coaching.

Today I had a phone chat with Eric Marguin, my french counterpart, and we ended up scheduling more or less a fixed week for the release of Dokeos 1.8.6. This will be week 41 if all goes according to plan, which is between the 6th and the 10th of October 2008. Although we won't be able to do the complete quiz tool revamp we wanted, we have been adding quite a lot to that and completing our developments on other tools. It's still too soon to talk about all that, but I'll be back around mid-September to make it all clear.

This is a *very* short note, but I'm writing it down in case I would forget in the coming weeks. There is a language detection package available in the PEAR project, which might come handy in the future for Dokeos: http://pear.php.net/package/Text_LanguageDetect

I just integrated the first web service implementation for Dokeos.

I thought I'll write a short update on what we are doing at Dokeos at the moment, so you don't think we're just sleeping through the summer holidays... Eric and Julian, of the French team, are currently working on a project for a specific hospital management school in France, and on a large and long-time review project before the migration of portals to version 1.8.5 for an important Belgian client.

In order to start offering Web Services inside Dokeos, I (and Stefaan Vanbillemont) have been testing out the SCA_SDO package from PECL (for PHP), that reportedly offers the possibility to deploy web services from existing functions only by including a common file and adding a bit of documentation "PHPDocumentor style" to the code. As we are using PHPDocumentor-like comments already, and have a lot of existing functions possibly offering all the services we would like to offer as web services, I thought SCA_SDO was a perfect match. The SDO-part of the extension will not be used in our contex

There are a few shortcomings with PHP5, but not so many. One of them, though, is that memory limits are a bit tricky to handle. We don't handle them very well in Dokeos either, so the results of experiencing a memory limit in Dokeos is this: Yes, nothing. That's generally what you would end up with. So if you want to make sure Dokeos can handle pretty much every kind of thing you would want it to do, you would be wise to put a memory limit of at least 8MB in your php.ini file.

I have added a Dokeos 1.8.6 page with details of the roadmap for 1.8.6, and hidden the Dokeos 1.8.5 page, considering we are now fully into the development of fixes and new features for 1.8.6.