Development

I'm always surprised at what horrible things web developers can actually do in their work just to use AJAX stuff. I won't hurt anyone because there would be many useless deaths, but guys... use your head! A user wants interfaces to look nice, but not to hide the whole screen while reloading a single block (where's the point of using AJAX?), and they don't want to have to click on every single element to extend it just to be able to see data, either.

For those of you who never really understood how Chamilo sessions work, here is a nice diagram (composed by Michela a long time ago) of the whole idea. [caption id="attachment_651" align="aligncenter" width="450"] Sessions in Chamilo[/caption]

In a recent meeting with the Dokeos 2.0 team, I realized that sometimes things are not quite evident. One of these cases that can only be understood with experience is that there's no use in allowing a user to upload files and keep the true filenames on the server's disk. In fact, it is quite a bigger problem to do that instead of changing the filenames and storing files as hashes.

Reason 1: Avoid security issues

When uploading a file to the server, you will have filters in place (won't you?).

The IRC channel of Dokeos now outbeats the Moodle channel both in terms of responsiveness and in terms of users (up to 40 users yesterday). This comes after I decided about a month ago that we should show a little more openness to the world as a group of developers, and should have a real-time interaction channel for all people wanting to ask something quick about Dokeos. There's support for English, Dutch, French and Spanish questions already. Come and join us on irc.freenode.net - #dokeos !

In Dokeos 1.8.6, we have removed (or better say "hidden") the official code field from the open registration form. Well, that's only logical since we suppose a normal, already registered, student will be registered through an Excel import sheet or some automatized way. But that might cause problems to some of you, so basically, the only thing you need to do to re-enable it is

• edit main/auth/inscription.php
• look for "official_code"
• uncomment the section containing this term

That's it.

I have been moderating the IRC channel of dokeos for some time now, but it would be nice to have a few people there to share the channel with me. So if you want to connect, we're the #dokeos channel on irc.freenode.net

Note: as of 2010, BeezNest has moved away from supporting Dokeos and launched the Chamilo project. This article was written in 2009, when BeezNest's team members were still the main developers for the Doke0s software, under the responsibility of the Doke0s company. Chamilo has since then reached double the size of the Doke0s project and is much more transparent in terms of code publication and community support. This article surprisingly still holds true for Chamilo up to version 1.11, but this might change in Chamilo 2.0 with a new system for e-mail sending.

A long time ago, I developed a loginshare script for a customer, that I think can now be shared with the community. I don't know much about LoginShare, and the truth is that their forum doesn't tell me much either, but based on a similar script, I developed the following script to use Dokeos 1.8.5 with it. Just in case it would be useful to anyone... (it certainly will be more useful this way than abandoned in one of my directories).

I just commited to the Dokeos SVN a little feature to allow for the inclusion of your RSS feed in your profile.

In this article, Stas Malyshev describes the internationalization extension and mentions it's been included in the PHP 5.3 core. It is an extensive article with plenty of examples to explain every component of Internationalization: Locale, Collator, Number formatter, Date formatter, Message formatter, Normalizer, Grapheme and Internation Domain Names. Pretty useful. Storing it for later (when Dokeos will require 5.3 by default, or the installation of the extension in 5.2)