Dokkeos

In Dokeos 1.8.5, in the admin screen that allows to add users to a session, we have implemented an AJAX search, or in human words, a search box that dynamically generates a short list of the users which contain the search string. This feature is only enabled when you have more than 100 users, because the users list would otherwise be very long to load. If you don't like this feature, and would like to keep to a straight, classical, 5000 users list, just change the main/admin/add_users_to_session.php, line 232, change "100" to "5000" to put the limit at 5000, or just remove the option by sett

A bunch of Dokeos users have reported problems with FCKeditor in Dokeos 1.8.5. The first one is with the creation of links in Firefox 3 (somehow the JavaScript was wrong there). This one has already been fixed in preparation of the next version of Dokeos. The other ones are all related to the management of special resources (flv, sounds, swf) which seem to be a little bit less reliable than in Dokeos 1.8.4. Be reassured that we are working on this right now.

I was playing around a little bit with a code metrics tool on the Ohloh website and, although I'm sure there's some kind of arguable element there as some included libraries add a lot of "noise" in code contributions, I was happily surprised to see that Dokeos isn't doing bad at all and is starting to get back at Moodle, in terms of code, contributors and global activity.

In case it would be of any interest to you, I am currently developing a kind of "branch" of Dokeos (although nothing legally-binding about the branch stuff) in Latin America, and more specifically in Peru. Peru is still what I would call a developing country, so at the same time it is hard to get used to (living there) and possibly excellent for future business opportunities.

We just realised that through an unfortunate series of events, I had removed a line that Arnaud had added in the documentation on the videoconference installation process. It was missing the part where you download the dokeos-conference.war file and copy it to your webapps directory.

I've had to review the SCORM content migration from 1.6 to 1.8 just today, and really, this is not something I'm enjoying.

I wanted to write this post for two reasons:

1. to remind everybody that we (the Dokeos company) continue to vaguely support this mode because we understand it is still more practical when installing it on a free/cheap hosting server
2. to help you avoid the tricky issue in the installation process when deciding which main db name to use

As the first point is pretty much complete, I'll go straight to the second point. In the Dokeos installation process, the database configuration screen asks you for a prefix and a database name.

Yes, we have our first annoying bug in Dokeos 1.8.5.

There is a common problem appearing when installing a new Chamilo portal that I have seen a lot recently, so I thought I'd share the details here.

The problem

When installing Chamilo on a cPanel-kind-of-hosting, it might happen that you complete the installation, but when you want to enter a newly-created course, an ugly error appears.

There's some new stuff on the net in terms of code analysis.