Techie

A few weeks ago, I explained how to change the Dokeos footer to make it "float". Today, in the context of an indirect contract with the Ministry of Education in Peru, I have to change the style a little bit more. The idea is to [1] have a left bar showing large tools icons in the course homepage, and [2] have an alternative portal homepage for users, showing an introductory screen of the main general tools. This must all work on a 800x600 screen (which is a real challenge).

[1] Left toolbar showing course tools

This is not as tricky as it sounds (although it's very close to it).

I just finished debugging one client's portal. For some reason, he couldn't see his SCORM content although he could see them in other LMS (Moodle, Claroline, ...). After spending 2 minutes checking the files and directories names, I realised he had stuff like this:

Act_Positive%20and%20negative[1]/.

as root SCORM path.

I'm currently reviewing quickly the slow queries occuring in MySQL when querying the database of a Dokeos 1.8.5 campus with 200.000 users. Of course, the number of users influences largely the execution time of a query, MySQL being known (to me at least, from experience with Dokeos and Avanquest) to be behaving particularly badly from 1M records in a single table upwards. Of course also, as you might have guessed already, most of the queries that lag the most are those related directly to users, and particularly relations between the users table and a log table or a registration table. Here

Wow... this is great news for us. Mike Melanson, the developer of the Linux version of the Flash plugin, just announced on his blog that Flash plugin 10 beta 2 will start supporting V4L2! For Dokeos, this means that we will now be able to use the video recording of our little webcams directly from Linux. This is probably the great news of the day...

2008-10-11 update

I'm just finishing an hour of testing here.

We've had reports about Dokeos creating problems when used with MySQL in strict mode. There's a large topic development on the forum about that. The idea is that MySQL can be set to be more strict about the SQL syntax used in queries.

In order to start offering Web Services inside Dokeos, I (and Stefaan Vanbillemont) have been testing out the SCA_SDO package from PECL (for PHP), that reportedly offers the possibility to deploy web services from existing functions only by including a common file and adding a bit of documentation "PHPDocumentor style" to the code. As we are using PHPDocumentor-like comments already, and have a lot of existing functions possibly offering all the services we would like to offer as web services, I thought SCA_SDO was a perfect match. The SDO-part of the extension will not be used in our contex

There are a few shortcomings with PHP5, but not so many. One of them, though, is that memory limits are a bit tricky to handle. We don't handle them very well in Dokeos either, so the results of experiencing a memory limit in Dokeos is this: Yes, nothing. That's generally what you would end up with. So if you want to make sure Dokeos can handle pretty much every kind of thing you would want it to do, you would be wise to put a memory limit of at least 8MB in your php.ini file.

For the sake of remembering myself of what I did, not being an expert in JavaScript coding but still needing to fix that placeholder bug in Dokeos, I'm writing this part as a real log, not really a well-presented article, but I'm still publishing it in case it would help someone else. In Dokeos, we use FCKeditor. The first problem that comes to mind is that I don't know exactly which version.

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

See update below for the fix

I'm trying to get my head around a super-tricky bug since last Friday.