One week until 1.8.6 stable

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.

Renaming things in a piece of software with users with habits

One of the terrible things that happen for users, from time to time, is that their usual actions are suddendly made completely unusual by a change of version, because the name (nothing else) of their favourite feature has been changed. We understand that, and we do everything we can to avoid it, but the truth is that some of our naming conventions don't really make sense. For example, a "learning path" is something only a guy with a degree in e-learning understands.

Entering schedule for Dokeos 1.8.6

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.