Development

This is a quick report on my first trial as a local group coach for the PHP TestFest 2009 for the PHP Perú group. Assistance: 20 people (all more or less PHP developers, some very fresh) Preparation time: about 6 hours of readings, downloading, slides preparation, etc Teaching time: 2 x 1/2h.

Update 2012-01-17: this article is quite old now and it might be completely irrelevant. It is only provided as a hint which might help you out writing a procedure in PHP to manage indexing. As Olly Betts (main developer of Xapian) commented below, the error message doesn't come directly from Xapian either, but it might be coming from some of the things built on top.

The new database schema sheets are available for Dokeos 1.8.6. Considering we are now finalizing the first RC release, these schemas are final and can be considered complete until 1.8.7 is out.

Thanks to an interesting article by Zoe Slattery (who works at IBM UK but is well known in the PHP Community for her work on the QA Team) in PHP Architect, I got into an attempt (at least) at preparing a participation to the PHP TestFest 2009. This article is an attempt at explaining briefly the steps undertaken.

Furio Petrossi, a long-time community member of Dokeos, developed a special version of Dokeos 1.8.6 Beta 3, which you can download as a ZIP, put on a USB stick, and then open on any Windows computer you run into (you do not need to actually "install it"). It's a ZIP that contains a few practical stuff. like UDrive, a BSD-Licensed software that creates a virtual disk on the system and allows for the installation of Dokeos in a safe environment. Basically, you uncompress the ZIP, execute the executable, and then everything is done automatically.

After a few weeks of struggling with the dilemn of releasing a third BETA or go directly to the Release Candidates, we finally chose to release a last quick BETA, for a few reasons:

1. I had introduced a mistake in the code in the BETA 2 package
2. we drastically improved web services (although this is still very badly documented) and in particular the way the system can connect to external systems
3. we have fixed a lot of bugs in the new social network section
4. we have fixed an annoying bug with user images
5. we have introduced an important change in the m

I've been looking for a few hours now for a "quick and easy" solution at securing the Dokeos web services, but I have still to go through a whole lot of technical details. Looking for help (at avoiding so much reading work), I have sent an e-mail to the php-general mailing-list, hoping for an answer. Because this e-mail is the result of considerable search efforts, I'm saving it here.

Download it from http://www.dokeos.com/download/dokeos-1.8.6-beta2.zip This time, we are quite sure it will be the last beta. The RC1 should be out before the end of February. There are still little bugs in documents edition and upload, as well as in exercises, but these are all minor bugs in comparison to what one could find in Dokeos 1.8.5. There are loooooads of new features (really, I mean it) - make sure you check the administration panel to activate some of them (the big ones).

So we have a beta... wow. There's been plenty of work on that version, but there is still a lot of things to fix.

Hehe... Should I announce it or should I keep it quiet a little bit more? :-) The beta is now available for download from the Dokeos repository: http://www.dokeos.com/download/dokeos-1.8.6-beta.zip There has been an enormous amount of work on this version. If you find any bug, please report it in http://projects.dokeos.com, after checking that it hasn't been reported already. We'll start making proper announcements soon :-)