Forum .LRN Q&A: Curriculum Status Report 3
The work that's been done:
Our energy has been focused primarily on integrating the Curriculum package with the .LRN environment and on writing user documentation. Ola has written an applet and a portlet, and (despite a bit of resistance) Curriculum is now working fine in .LRN as well. Currently the .LRN HEAD has some noquote-related bugs, however, so it doesn't look as pretty as it will. The integration work was made much easier by our consequent usage of includable lib files (just a tip).
I'm writing the documentation using this structure: Abstract, The Big Picture, User's Guide (Student's Guide + Teacher's Guide), (Site Wide) Administrator's Guide, Developer's Guide, and Future Developments. We were thinking that a help link on the Curriculum index page could lead to the Student's Guide, and a similar one on the Curriculum admin page to the Teacher's Guide.
We've also spent some time fixing little misbehaviors in the user interface. The permission checks weren't quite right in the universal add-view-edit ("ave") script, but now any type of user wanting to make any type of use of this multipurpose ad_form should be served with the right page (and not get a "Security Violation" accusation thrown in her face). Frame behavior, link titles, and other potentially irritating details have been looked over in the process. Carl's Google-style frame functionality and the vertical curriculum bar have been added as well.
The general-purpose bar widget for the toolkit that is on Carl's wish list (and ours) will have to remain on it for the time being. Our budget is limited, and the work must be focused on fulfilling the contracted obligations (which include, apart from Curriculum itself, a fix of File Storage). However, it's hard to picture the next Curriculum version with automatic and conditional sequencing of branched curriculums not having Wolfram's progress percentage meter, so we're definitely interested in implementing it at some point.
Problems encountered:
There was an OpenACS/.LRN incompatibility issue detected when we were trying to set up our subsite-aware package in .LRN; we were expecting a Curriculum instance to exist in an acs-subsite package type, but the .LRN counterpart is called dotlrn. This is a shame, since it means dual platform modules like Curriculum will have to bother about what environment they exist in. The TAB (Don) offered a recommendation of an acceptable solution, and we're working on getting it to work. The problem is to perform a site node check for dotlrn or acs-subsite that won't go bananas when there is no dotlrn package type present.
Outlook for the future:
We're reaching project closing time - time to tie up the bag around the features we have. It's still not too late for you all to give us your valuable input, but please test the package now rather than later. The remainder of the project will be spent:
- Creating a check for whether or not a URL is subsite-external.
- Implementing the many and complex aspects of Workflow.
- Writing and DocBook-formatting user documentation.
- Fixing a patch for virtual URLs in FS/CR.
