Dokkeos

Note: in 2010, after several years of working with Dokeos and for multiple reasons (of which some ethical), we decided to create Chamilo on the ashes of what became the "community edition" of Dokeos. This article is maintained for historical purposes.

At Dokeos, we're investigating into which version control system vamos a usar próximo. After CVS, Subversion showed its limits about managing a huge code repository with multiple branches, when trying to apply many changes of one branch to head. The two most interesting systems remaining are Git and Mercurial. Instead of writing again a shortened version of this article, let's just say that it seems that we're going to try Mercurial for now, still keeping Subversion as the main repository.

Quickly, because I'm a little out of free time right now, we've been lended 6 XO green laptops for 24 months, fo a project we intend to start shortly on a Dokeos-XO integration work. More details:

• the project proposal: http://rt.laptop.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=41215
• the acceptance process report: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Contributors_program/June_5%2C_2009

I'm very happy about that and I can't wait to finally be able to wo

I'm currently tracing what might have been an attack on the free campus through the Apache logs... Nothing related, but then I just realized we had some OLPC visiting the free campus a while ago:

zzz.zzz.zzz.zzz - - [16/Feb/2009:11:47:55 +0100] "GET /main/forum/index.php?cidReq=GR03 HTTP/1.1" 200 6839 "http://campus.dokeos.com/courses/GR03/?id_session=0" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i586; en-US; rv:1.9) Gecko/2008072400 OLPC/0.4.6-1.olpc3 (XO) Firefox/3.0"

I guess we're going to have more of these in the near future (with one million sold worldwide as

Last year, Dokeos Latinoamérica, with the agreement of Thomas, made a deal with Macro Editorial in Peru to edit a series of primary school syllabus under the name "Dokeos Kids". We also later launched http://www.dokeoskids.com/, which has served to host a few ressources since then.

This is a draft list of what you need to think of when you upgrade a Dokeos from a cPanel install...

• check you have the sufficient login information to access the Dokeos portal, the cPanel files manager and the cPanel MySQL account for the corresponding Dokeos portal
• connect to the cPanel server
• take a backup of the database (possibly through phpMyAdmin if there is no easier way) and download it on your computer (safeguard)
• connect to the file manager
• if possible compress the whole Dokeos directory (after a check to see if archive is not filled w

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.

Pèire Brechet, of Marseille, France, asked me to be allowed to translate Dokeos to Occitan, an antique language from the borders of France, Spain and Italy. With Friulian, Esperanto and Cusquenian Quechua, this makes for our fourth "special language" integrated into Dokeos. There's still a lot of work to be done to get these languages to become a full translation, though... Heads up, and let's go for 1.8.6!

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

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.