Organisation

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

It's been a while since the idea first came to me, but yesterday we managed, with a bunch of acquaintances, to setup the basic structure so, starting 23rd of May, I'll be giving an 80-hours long specialized PHP course to 10 pre-selected candidates from Perú, in order for them to prepare for the Zend PHP Certification and for me to spot the good ones and give them a job right away. The training will not be very expensive, but we will put a psychological entry test and will ask for a bunch of important prerequisites. I'm used to give the training as I just ended up a 3-months training for my e

The pen-test mailing list (see http://www.securityfocus.com) has a short thread going about security certifications, which basically gives two possibilities for security certifications in the case of watching the information security: http://www.giac.org/certifications/security/gcia.php http://www.giac.org/certifications/security/gcih.php That's a personal bookmark for later. There's also an Ubuntu Professional Certi

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 :-)

I added a nice changelog (or rather "new features" log) on the Dokeos 1.8.6 page (see link above), and also took the opportunity to refresh the schedule :-)

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.

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.

For those of you who wonder when 1.8.6 will be out, basically, the answer is: when this list is closed. There are probably a few more bugs to appear before we actually close them all, but we should be on track until the end of November, when we expect to release it. If you want it out faster, don't hesitate to help us like Juan Carlos and Ivan do (through http://projects.dokeos.com), that will definitely speed up development.

Dokeos Latinoamérica will be represented by Julio in Guatemala this week, for an intensive one-week Dokeos training to a Guatemaltec university.

Tomorrow night I will be giving a speech about Dokeos and the e-learning in Peru to about 450 to 500 teachers and school directors. This is my biggest audience ever, and I must admit I'm a bit stressed (it's like being a star, really...