OK, we're almost ready to get started in earnest on our dotLRN experiment. Janine has been clearing out the showstopper bugs as we've found them.
One of the first things I've been doing is going through and changing some of the names of things. Obviously, we don't want our clients to be working in a portal for something called a "class." So anywhere I can, I've been renaming "class" to "project" and "subject" to "client." I'm not quite sure what to do about the "department" level, since we really only need two levels. For now, I'm just calling it "host." I'd want a real dotWRK app should allow for configurable numbers of levels, though.
Anyway, there's good news and bad news regarding renaming in dotLRN. The good news it looks like you can rename things (classes, professors, departments, students, etc.) almost everywhere (although I'm still finding a few holdouts in the breadcrumb trails that I can't figure out how to change). The bad news is that the settings to make these changes seem to be scattered to the four winds. If you go into the (OpenACS) site map, a good number of the nodes under the "dotlrn/" node have parameter settings where you can do name changes. Often names you're changing are the same, too; I must have changed "class" to "project" in half a dozen places. On top of that, there's yet another place you can make essentially the same changes from a class's control panel. It's not really clear which changes affect what, whether there is any cascading, etc.
If somebody in the know could write down a list of all the places you can make these changes and how they relate to each other, I'd be happy to translate that into a HOWTO.
On another topic, I'm looking forward to experimenting with the "copy" feature that lets you clone a class (or project, in our case). We use certain process docs and templates in every project, so I'm thinking we should set up an archtype project portal with those documents already in it and just copy it every time we have a new project. Being able to set up a complete project portal with essentially a couple of clicks will be nice.
