Development

As the beta draws closer (it should have been released last week but we had to add some last minute stuff to avoid waiting 6 months before being able to integrate them), we just happened to organise the January Drupal Perú reunion here in Lima, and...

When developing GPL applications, we are constantly faced with the problem of having to find usable icons that do not infringe the license... Julio recently posted an article on our Spanish blog to talk about IconFinder, a great website to do just that.

There's a bit of a fuss at the moment around the recent release of a list of the 25 Most Dangerous Programming Errors known to humanity. Apparently, there's still some work going on to recommend the best practices to avoid them, but the list is available here: http://www.sans.org/top25errors/ Dokeos is most probably falling short of a few of these. Let's try to analyse that and make it a better soft.

Today I had to explain to a customer how to register time and completeness in a SCORM learning path, considering he's got Flash content and he doesn't know anything about SCORM. This is what I answered (with little changes) The idea is that Dokeos deals with SCORM contents by providing a JavaScript API (a library that can be called from the Flash) to enable SCORM features. To enable this, there are various steps that need to be taken... 1. Your content should be a SCORM package. 2. Each step of your content should send a LMSInitialize() call to the Dokeos SCORM API when opened. 3.

Here's a nice article on how to define nice HTML form buttons that look good and work even without JS: http://particletree.com/features/rediscovering-the-button-element/

I sure am discovering a lot of interesting stuff on the net this week. I'm just done reading and watching a video on the eLML website. First reaction: interesting project. Apparently, some of the developers of fellow e-learning management system OLAT are involved in the development of eLML as well. eLML is just an XML schema for writing learning content.

Reading PHP Architect's November 2008 issue (and in particular the Google Gadgets article by Timothy Boronczyk), I remembered reading a name yesterday (on the Elgg.org features list) that I have seen very often and which I never  got to the bottom of: OAuth. Well, today I decided that this ignorance was enough and that it was time to get there and see what it is... and it just happens to be exactly what we need in Dokeos to secure our web services!

The next development release is planned for the 7th or 8th of January 2009. We are first making sure all changes are in the database, then we will make sure everything works, then we'll release this version. Once it is released, there will be a 1 week debug period. Once this week is over, we will release the first Release Candidate and, if nobody complains, the Stable Release one week later.

I've been asked to provide and article about the Dokeos community progress a few days ago, so I wrote a base and we finally get this piece of news on the Dokeos main page. The activity of Dokeos has truly increased lately, for 3 reasons. Partly due to an increased activity in the Dokeos 2.0 development.

This is an unstable release intended to help developers and dokeos fans to try out the new features of Dokeos 1.8.6 from a simple packaged version. This IS NOT to be used as a start for a production installation. No excuse will be accepted in exchange of community support if you *did* install a 1.8.6 Alpha and started using it in production. If you do that, you are on your own.