Forum .LRN Q&A: Fast Demo installations

1: Fast Demo installations - RFC

Posted by Rafael Calvo on 01/21/05 12:05 AM

One of the top priorities identified today for the consortium is to get a super fast installation of dotlrn working.

Key goal: A extremely simple demo that can be working on either a Linux, Win or OSX box in < 1hr

Some features I would like:

1. One single bundle download for everything needed (aolserver, postgres, dotlrn).

2. Most popular platforms available

3. Well tested

4. Nice default templates (we have some that are pretty good althought the color schemes could be improved). Commercial quality graphics. It would also be nice to be able tos say that this templates ar W3C accessibility compliant.

5. Some preloaded data. The idea is that when I install the demo I get a few users, communities, postings in forums, etc.

I know that several people are working on this (knopix). Could people post here their status and ideas about this. What needs to happen to make this possible. Is it possible to have this in February?

Rafael

2: Re: Fast Demo installations - RFC (response to 1)

Posted by Alfred Essa on 01/21/05 05:27 AM

As Rafael noted, this has been identified as a very important priority. We would like feedback on status from the community and we also encourage submission of micro-grants.

4: Re: Fast Demo installations - RFC (response to 1)

Posted by Rafael Calvo on 01/21/05 07:31 AM

I want to thank the e-lane people for the Knowpix CD work. A chinese profesor from Hebei Univ tried out and had the demo system running in 10min!
Could someone add this in a very highlighted form in the home page of openacs.org and dotlrn.org

Anyway, I would still like to have comments about the other options for this.

thanks

Rafael

3: Re: Fast Demo installations - RFC (response to 1)

Posted by Malte Sussdorff on 01/21/05 07:32 AM

Getting the Knoppix CD to do what you want is easy if you are talking about a *DEMO*.

If you want a super easy installation, this is a different matter.

1) Already there (with Knoppix)
2) I assume that the PC world has a market share of 95%, so I guess it is safe to say Already there (with Knoppix).
3) 😊.
4) I trained our graphic designer on how to work with .LRN just now, so expect a micro grant.
5) This is fine and true, but the preloaded data should be there in multiple languages as well, with multiple language users.

I'm pretty sure what you want can be done by February, as it is not an aweful amount of work, if we talk about a *DEMO*.

5: Re: Fast Demo installations - RFC (response to 1)

Posted by Malte Sussdorff on 01/21/05 07:57 AM

One notion on the default templates. Currently OpenACS does not support skinning (it might after changes from CTK are rolled in). What I could think off though is to provide an template install script that takes the templates out of the /templates directory and extracts the files to all the places they need to be. Obviously the template install package should include a preview of the templates.

As for the W3C accessibility compliance, you face the problem that some HTML code is still contained in .TCL files and even some .adp pages make it harder for people to access them. The toolkit is being rewritten to take this code out, once a developer starts working on a package (at least I hope so). But I guess Don and Dave are more apt to give you an detailed comment on how much work would be needed on the toolkit in both regards.

6: Re: Fast Demo installations - RFC (response to 1)

Posted by Nima Mazloumi on 01/21/05 08:46 AM

Also there is this excellent installer of Vlassis for Windows:
https://openacs.org/forums/message-view?message_id=198477

7: Re: Fast Demo installations - RFC (response to 1)

Posted by xx xx on 01/21/05 12:17 PM

Although BSD systems seem out of your scope, there is a FreeBSD installer. It currently installs a complete OpenACS installation within 1 hour from scratch, just assuming you have the FreeBSD OS running. Using the package system should be faster (if 1 hour is too slow).

1. After a test run (or make fetch-recursive), the /usr/ports/distfiles directory can be tarred and distributed. It will contain everything you need.

2. The installer could be extended to work with different OS using Darwinports.

3. It needs more testing, although it runs fine for me.

4. Nice templates like the ones of Giancarlo Luxardo (I like those) should be in the openACS/.LRN tarballs/CVS if possible.

5. Preloading information may be easy, I think. Create a server with the info you would like to show. Create a nightly or manual backup of this server. Use that tarball and demo that you can take the server from one OS to another (for example RH7 to FreeBSD5 as I did last week..). Does that work between all operating systems? BTW, Peter's install script with data doesn't work on FreeBSD (yet).

8: Re: Fast Demo installations - RFC (response to 1)

Posted by Caroline Meeks on 01/21/05 03:09 PM

Let me repeat the thank you's to E-Lane for the Knoppix CD and to Malte who has also done a ton of work on it.

Another approach is a windows installer which Project Open is working on. This also seems very close to done. See this thread.

https://openacs.org/forums/message-view?message%5fid=213806

9: Re: Fast Demo installations - RFC (response to 1)

Posted by Malte Sussdorff on 01/21/05 03:26 PM

I just got back from a meeting with Pharus53 (http://pharus53.de/en/index.php), a company that does E-Learning Modules for Software Rollouts. They are willing to collaborate with us on creating a Storybook and the Screenshots for our German Demo installation along with the Knoppix CD. Nothing is set in stone, but it doesn't hurt to think along these lines already.

We already have a storybook from our presentations in Germany, but I want to encourage others (especially the *users* of .LRN) to comment what features they would like to have demonstrated in such a storybook.

The storybook shall not be a replacement of the Software, but a smooth introduction into using .LRN so people will understand how they can achieve certain things.

10: Re: Fast Demo installations - RFC (response to 1)

Posted by Dave Bauer on 01/21/05 04:19 PM

Malte,

Supporting alternative templates is straightforward with a small change to ad_return_template. Now this requires Tcl scripts that return a page to call ad_return_template. Once you do that, you can easily specify a alternative location for ADPs to support a different look. In general we want to step back first though, and clean up the pages so we can do better skinning through simple CSS changes.

Changing ADPs is a huge undertaking compared to editing a CSS file.

11: Re: Fast Demo installations - RFC (response to 1)

Posted by Rocael Hernández Rizzardini on 01/21/05 05:10 PM

E-LANE is working in maintaining:
1. Debian package installer (Galileo)
2. Windows graphical installer (which also should support linux) (Reading University, Vlassis did the initial work and they will continue to support further distributions)
3. Knoppix CD (UC3M)

We plan to produce empty and preloaded data distributions, starting late february at most, but some are already being done.

The BSD* news are great!, specially that if you support mac OS X.

12: Re: Re: Fast Demo installations - RFC (response to 10)

Posted by Malte Sussdorff on 01/21/05 05:32 PM

I totally agree, but the question was to have multiple templates by February. Cleaning up code will take considerably longer I fear than changing the default adp's.

13: Re: Fast Demo installations - RFC (response to 1)

Posted by Dave Bauer on 01/21/05 06:17 PM

Aha. You are just referring to the master templates that affect the site. Never mind me.

14: Re: Fast Demo installations - RFC (response to 1)

Posted by Rafael Calvo on 01/21/05 10:12 PM

I think is that we are not comunicating this well.
The home page (here and dotlrn.org) needs to have something like:
-------------------------------
Using .LRN

1) TRy a super fast demo - instant pleasure
- Use our demo server (link)
- Run it from a CD. Download the Knoppix CD image here (link)

2) Try our fast installers. (about 1 hour if you have the OS)
- For Windows (link)
- For BSD
- For Debian Linux

3) Follow our well documented instructions to install the source code (link) or even download the latest development version from CVS.

---------

I think we are not communicating this progress to new users.

How far are we of making statement 2 come true?

Regarding the skins/graphic design I agree with Dave they should be mostly on CSS. New people would like to customize it but they do not know adp.

cheers

Rafael

15: Re: Re: Fast Demo installations - RFC (response to 7)

Posted by Giancarlo Luxardo on 01/23/05 09:55 PM

4. Nice templates like the ones of Giancarlo Luxardo (I like those) should be in the openACS/.LRN tarballs/CVS if possible.

Aldert, I can upload these templates to CVS, the point is that we don't have yet an appropriate location in the repository... Also, I am not sure that it would be really useful, since we have done site-wide customizations (css + adp + tcl), which are not integrated yet with the final 2.1.1.

What I suggest is that we define a directory in CVS for "demo sites", where those who are willing to release a site implementation (a live site or just a test server) can upload a tarball, possibly with some data (i.e. it would be a back-up including content repository and database). It would be good to document the customizations, code branch, etc... Packaging this site into an installer as described in this thread requires more work (on several platforms?), and it might be limited to one "default" installation.

There were recently several discussions related to UI customizations, skins, etc... I think that there are several possible enhancements: moving as much as possible to CSS, get rid of in-line CSS, etc... It would also be nice to have a better integration between ADP and HTML editors. Useful tips for Dreamweaver are given here:
https://openacs.org/forums/message-view?message%5fid=172746

I have found an interesting discussion about csszengarden:
https://openacs.org/forums/message-view?message%5fid=167160
Is there any follow-up?...

Currently OpenACS does not support skinning (it might after changes from CTK are rolled in).

Malte, do you have more details about this?

Forum .LRN Q&A: Fast Demo installations - RFC