dokkeos 1.8.6

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 :-)

Reading PHP Architect's November 2008 issue (and in particular the Google Gadgets article by Timothy Boronczyk), I remembered reading a name yesterday (on the Elgg.org features list) that I have seen very often and which I never  got to the bottom of: OAuth. Well, today I decided that this ignorance was enough and that it was time to get there and see what it is... and it just happens to be exactly what we need in Dokeos to secure our web services!

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.

Yesterday I finished a 20 hours job of moving the SCORM API in Dokeos 1.8.6 from XAJAX to jQuery.

[caption id="attachment_302" align="alignright" width="100" caption="Dokeos in Colombia"][/caption] I'm leaving in just a few minutes from now for the airport, to go to Colombia for 2 important conferences. One about freedom of knowledge, another about Ubuntu in Colombia.

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.

Today I had a phone chat with Eric Marguin, my french counterpart, and we ended up scheduling more or less a fixed week for the release of Dokeos 1.8.6. This will be week 41 if all goes according to plan, which is between the 6th and the 10th of October 2008. Although we won't be able to do the complete quiz tool revamp we wanted, we have been adding quite a lot to that and completing our developments on other tools. It's still too soon to talk about all that, but I'll be back around mid-September to make it all clear.

I thought I'll write a short update on what we are doing at Dokeos at the moment, so you don't think we're just sleeping through the summer holidays... Eric and Julian, of the French team, are currently working on a project for a specific hospital management school in France, and on a large and long-time review project before the migration of portals to version 1.8.5 for an important Belgian client.

I have added a Dokeos 1.8.6 page with details of the roadmap for 1.8.6, and hidden the Dokeos 1.8.5 page, considering we are now fully into the development of fixes and new features for 1.8.6.