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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.

Un  lunes 09 de marzo di mi examen de certificación Zend Recuerdo que hace un tiempo leí el libro de certificación de PHP4. Pero el exámen del 5 es muy diferente. Simplemente quiero compartir la experiencia y darle algunas recomendaciones a quienes se piensen certificar. Esta certificación no se trata de evaluar funciones memorizadas.

A huge number of you might get a very big surprise when updating your Dokeos platform to 1.8.6 soon. As much as we generally try to help users (not to confuse them, keep them by the hand), there are sometimes when a large, influent group of people think a change is needed, and so this change is operated without having a particular consensus. This is what happened here. Dokeos "courses" will now be called "trainings", starting from 1.8.6. The same will go for French, where "cours" will become "formations".

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

For those of you lucky enough to have tried a fixed-width layout in Dokeos, you will probably have fallen across the horrible background-color line bug that appears just below the banner... [caption id="attachment_428" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="A background-colored bar appears below the banner"]

Most of you playing with a laptop or a PC with a beamer will have noticed that when you change the resolution of your screen, applying the changes suddendly blocks your screen in a high frequency that prevents you from changing back to normal. Didier Misson (one of my fellow BxLUGers) wrote an article about that desktop resolution bug (in French) and how to fix it changing the /home/[user]/.config/monitors.xml file. Might help...