Forum OpenACS Q&A: This week with OpenACS

Hello all,

Sorry this post is much out off topic but I thought use this space to congratulate with people from this community and say i'm very proud to take part of this great project.

Since OpenACS4/.LRN1 i'm following developments of these projects - installing software, suggesting patches (few), reporting bugs, trying educate friends of mine to use project technologies, looking for people to use the software. But this week things happened that made me reflect about how processes, data model and docs from OpenACS are really, really great on building scalable, reliable online communities.

Two important things that happened:

1) we - Rodrigo, Felipe and I - needed to upgrade a custom dotlrn2.0.3 installation in www.cope.sede.embrapa.br to dotlrn2.1b in oacs-5-1 tag. Untill now we never have had to do such upgrade out of compat tag. OK, no fear.. just read docs, backup, testing recover from backup and go ahead because everything will be fine. But installation had about 1500 users and 300 Mb data distributed in forums, file-storage, weblogger on a lot of communities. What about upgrading fails?

Documentation here - https://openacs.org/doc/openacs-5-1/upgrade-5-0-dot.html - on Upgrading a Custom or CVS site was followed (just switching openacs-5-1-compat to oacs-5-1) and upgrade was fine. Upgraded system is in test phase to ensures quality and stability but we think it will work fine.

2) People that we showed OpenACS/.LRN here in Brazil are very interested in building online communities but they want a system for e-learning too with SCORM, Assessment, user tracking and syncronous capabilities. We are following development of such implementations in .LRN, learning it from docs, but untill now only SCORM was tested with LORS and Jabber from openacs.org storage.

Today we installed a testing system in www.intertexto.info:8002 with openacs (head) + dotlrn (oacs-5-1) with LORS + Assessment + Chat + Jabber (from CVS) - i really dont know how stable is this combination! Voilá.. install was fine.

We could import content on LORS, QTI files on Assessment, testing create chat rooms... unfortunately not tested jabber from cvs yet but we will.

We are very impressed with these implementations.

This is OpenACS/.LRN! Great projects with great people. Susteinable. Interoperable. Reliable. Extensible. Well documented.

Thank you all!

Hello,

We are having problems to install oacs + dotLRN 2.1 + LORS + Assessment. How did you install this? What packages did you used because we are having problems to install these in the same machine (The content-repository from HEAD doesn't seem to work very well with dotLRN).
What exact cvs checkout commands did you use?

Thanks.

Hi Natalia,

Checkout (or export) commands used:

export CVS_RSH=ssh

cvs -z3 -d :pserver:anonymous@openacs.org:/cvsroot export -r HEAD acs-core

mv openacs-4 service1

cd service1/packages

cvs -z3 -d :pserver:anonymous@openacs.org:/cvsroot export -r oacs-5-1 dotlrn-all

Changes we needed to do to put it working:

in service1/packages

backup acs-bootstrap-installer, acs-lang from HEAD :

mv acs-bootstrap-installer acs-bootstrap.head
mv acs-lang acs-lang.head

export (or checkout) acs-bootstrap-installer and acs-lang from oacs-5-1:

cvs -z3 -d :pserver:anonymous@openacs.org:/cvsroot export -r oacs-5-1 -d acs-bootstrap-installer openacs-4/packages/acs-booststrap-installer

cvs -z3 -d :pserver:anonymous@openacs.org:/cvsroot export -r oacs-5-1 -d acs-lang openacs-4/packages/acs-lang

export (or checkout) LORS, ASSESSMENT, CHAT, JABBER from HEAD

cvs -z3 -d :pserver:anonymous@openacs.org:/cvsroot export -r HEAD -d lors openacs-4/packages/lors

cvs -z3 -d :pserver:anonymous@openacs.org:/cvsroot export -r HEAD -d lorsm openacs-4/packages/lorsm

cvs -z3 -d :pserver:anonymous@openacs.org:/cvsroot export -r HEAD -d dotlrn-lorsm openacs-4/packages/dotlrn-lorsm

cvs -z3 -d :pserver:anonymous@openacs.org:/cvsroot export -r HEAD -d lorsm-portlet openacs-4/packages/lorsm-portlet

cvs -z3 -d :pserver:anonymous@openacs.org:/cvsroot export -r HEAD -d assessment openacs-4/packages/assessment

cvs -z3 -d :pserver:anonymous@openacs.org:/cvsroot export -r HEAD -d assessment-portlet openacs-4/packages/assessment-portlet

cvs -z3 -d :pserver:anonymous@openacs.org:/cvsroot export -r HEAD -d dotlrn-assessment openacs-4/packages/dotlrn-assessment

same to chat, chat-portlet, dotlrn-chat, jabber, jabber-portlet, dotlrn-jabber

mv dotlrn/install.xml ..

Ok. Install dotlrn.

You could use sample course from E-lane people

http://weg.ee.usyd.edu.au/people/ernieg/thesis/course.zip

from this thread https://openacs.org/forums/message-view?message_id=191471

to test lors and assessment import and funcionalities

Hope it help.