Dokkeos

During the 3 coming days, I will be developing a feature for Dokeos that allows a Dokeos administrator to add data to users' profiles. For example, you will be able to add an age (or better, a date of birth), a sex, a mother tongue, etc. Whatever you want, basically. Once these fields are setup and filled, you will be able to limit the statistic results to only a subset of users (i.e.

[digg=http://www.digg.com/programming/Tips_and_tricks_for_using_pseudo_CSS_in_OpenLaszlo_4] Having had to deal with this stuff lately with the Dokeos videoconference development, I thought it might be useful. The mainstream page is located on the Dokeos wiki, so in the following weeks, I recommend, looking at it over there. Here goes... The new version of the videoconference tool (to be out at the same time as Dokeos 1.8.5) can be theme-modified via CSS.

I had to upgrade the reservations tool for Dokeos lately. Nothing much but a few variables and constants renaming, but the use of the module itself is quite a mystery to me.

It's already in the code for Dokeos 1.8.5 since 2 weeks ago: files extensions filtering. It was possible, in 1.8.4, to filter files extensions coming from ZIP files, but I didn't have time back then to include a widespread file filtering. It is included now. There is still a problem whereby Windows interprets files looking inside them, so it does not need the extension to be wrong in order to execute the file as is needed for a virus to spread.

I don't know why exactly, maybe it's because some system administrators go on holiday, or maybe it's because evil students (understand young crackers) are on holiday themselves, but the festive season is always a time when we have more attempted security attacks on our servers. Oh, by the way, hackers are just people looking into the code to change it, they're not evil. Crackers are people getting onto other's systems and trying to misuse it.

I'm currenty doing two things in Dokeos

1. adding and extending the gradebook extension (originally developed by Bert Steppé and Stijn Konings while on internship at Hogeschool Gent)
2. adding a certificates system, based on the gradebook (or more precisely on an evaluation from the gradebook), so that a student can print a certificate once he has succesfully completed an evaluation/course/learning-process

The first part is almost complete (added the learning paths as a evaluable resource and allowed evaluations to spread over several courses).

[digg=http://digg.com/software/LDAP_Active_Directory_and_LDAP_SSO] I've had to reply to part of a call for tender today. The interesting question was "Can Dokeos interact with our LDAP/SSO system?". So first I should review the vocabulary a bit.

I've mentioned SCORM before, but I didn't enter into the details.