Dokkeos

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?).

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.

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.

The LMS Evaluation Commitee of the University of North Carolina at Charlorte just published the results of a 5 quarters survey about the implementation of Moodle to replace their current BlackBoard Vista. Although I don't particularly like Moodle (mostly because our users find it much more complicated to use than Dokeos), there are two things that I really liked in the results from this report (and I'm sure there are loads of other interesting data in there if you keep your eyes opened)

[caption id="attachment_548" align="aligncenter" width="149" caption="DOKUDA - Dokeos Users Days America"]

Note: in 2010, after several years of working with Dokeos and for multiple reasons (of which some ethical), we decided to create Chamilo on the ashes of what became the "community edition" of Dokeos. This article is maintained for historical purposes.

Today I went to the Escuelab in the centre of Lima to meet with Alberto, Kike Mayorga and Kiko Contreras. My visit was apparently taken with great interest and they've video-interviewed me for some time to talk about DOKUDA and my projects with Dokeos and the OLPC (now updated to Chamilo and the OLPC). Apparently, the idea to have Dokeos/Chamilo run on one of the XO itself was never thought about, and that seemed to be an announcement of uttermost interest to them that this *could* be done at all.

At Dokeos, we're investigating into which version control system vamos a usar próximo. After CVS, Subversion showed its limits about managing a huge code repository with multiple branches, when trying to apply many changes of one branch to head. The two most interesting systems remaining are Git and Mercurial. Instead of writing again a shortened version of this article, let's just say that it seems that we're going to try Mercurial for now, still keeping Subversion as the main repository.