dokkeos 1.8.6

This one is tricky... (and not so practical just yet) So let's say you have a 120 pages document, written using MS-Word, and which is understood pretty well by OpenOffice.org Writer (v2). Now let's say your document is a technical document and, as such, it is half-full of screenshots taken from a software interface (in this case Dokeos) directly into the language of the document. See what I mean? Now, let's say this document is in French and you want to translate it to English (or Spanish, the problem is exactly the same).

Regular readers will start to think that I like giving delays that I cannot respect. To be on the *safe* side, I'd like them to know that customers always have priority over the software, which gives me a good excuse to be late on delivering the public version of Dokeos 1.8.6 :-) Alternatively, customers are the ones investing into Dokeos and allowing us to develop a great product. So thank you, dear customer.

We've been stuck all week on SCORM problems (time tracking).

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.

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

Download it from http://www.dokeos.com/download/dokeos-1.8.6-beta2.zip This time, we are quite sure it will be the last beta. The RC1 should be out before the end of February. There are still little bugs in documents edition and upload, as well as in exercises, but these are all minor bugs in comparison to what one could find in Dokeos 1.8.5. There are loooooads of new features (really, I mean it) - make sure you check the administration panel to activate some of them (the big ones).

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 :-)

As the beta draws closer (it should have been released last week but we had to add some last minute stuff to avoid waiting 6 months before being able to integrate them), we just happened to organise the January Drupal Perú reunion here in Lima, and...