.LRN 2.5 Release Management

About

• Next stable release: 2.5.0
• Las stable release: 2.4.1
• Tentavive deadlines:
  • may 31, 2009: code freeze and branch
  • june 1, 2009: alpha release process starts
  • june 15, 2009: beta release
  • july 15, 2009: final release

.LRN 2.5 will contain the packages included in the following cvs modules:

• acs-core
• dotlrn-all
• dotlrn-extras

See Aliases at CVS for a detailed list of the packages included in those modules.

Releases are coordinated by the .LRN Leadership Team.

Weekly technical meetings in IRC at openacs channel:

• Summer: Wednesdays, following the OCT one at 16:00 GMT
• Winter: Wednesdays, following the OCT one at 17:00 GMT.

To-do List

• Databases support:
  • Postgresql 8.2 and 8.3
  • Oracle 10 and 11
• Replace "html_p" by "mime/type" and richtext widget for input (news, bulk-mail, others?)
• calendar: localize notifications
• forums:
  • DONE: localize notifications
  • removed the SC implementation of search to avoid confusion (search now implemented with callbacks)
• assessment:
  • review daveb changes
  • added "views" support (explicit dependency)

Wish List

NOTE: xowiki was NOT part of .LRN 2.4 or earlier. Since noone from the accessibility group has checked, whether xowiki is compliant with WCAG 1.0 double-A, the DotLRN consortium board meeting decided in Valencia to include xowiki and maybe some other packages in a dotlrn-extras distribution in 2.5. This extra-distribution should not have the strong accessibility requirement as dotlrn-all, where every package must be manually checked in detail by some "accessibility expert".

Note by Don Baccus:  Honchos, not an ad hoc group of .LRN consortium members, decides what goes into .LRN.  Honchos proposed, and the board agreed, that a MINIMUM requirement for inclusion is accessibility compliance.  If xowiki hasn't been checked, by default it DOES NOT go in, not vice-versa.

New features

• Removal of .LRN applets:  see the Removal of Applet thread
• Wiki (xowiki with special policy set designed for .LRN, i.e. avoid professors writing their own tcl scripts or access the DB (DONE), probably a simplified UI?) Galileo will work on this and a few additions to have a wiki for .LRN, in late may / early june 2008.
• Content package: tools for creating content online for .LRN
• xo-S5: online presentation tool (and get rid of wimpy-point)
• Replacement of static portlets by xowiki portlet pages (need to figure out if we use the same xowiki instance for "portlet pages" and for the wiki)
• Blogger replacement with xowiki blogger? (have to review funtionality list, upgrade from actual blogger, others)

Having the idea of a macro-tool (xowiki) that can be easily customized for specific use with prototypes and others will help us to the reduce the code to maintain.

To do

• xowiki (What's missing?)
• content: produce an standard release that work atop .LRN (oracle & PG).
• s5
• xo static portlet (supported via xowiki-portlet and dotrln-xowiki; what else?)
• blogger

Packages that could be xoified?

There are packages that could be replaced with xowiki/xotcl.
xowiki might need a finer granularity (object level) for permissions (parties), categories, comments.

• news (if we manage to tell xowiki to use dates to display and archive a news item
• edit-this-page
• bulkmail (like news but with email being sent out and ui for selecting role/users)

I would even to that far to say that we can replace forums (using page_order) and calendar (similar to news/bulkmail but special UI).