Forum .LRN Q&A: dotLRN project update

The testing team is at the starting gate, waiting for a 4.6 release so they can begin their testing on a "known" release of OpenACS.  The 4.6 release should happen this week, according to Don, so they should be able to get started Real Soon Now.  Once they have taken a preliminary pass through the  packages we should have a better idea of when a release will happen.  We don't anticipate a long testing cycle since the product is already in production use at Sloan.

In the meantime, several members of the group have news to report from their evangelism efforts, which they will be adding to this thread.

*ahem* Next?

We visited the NetLearning2002 conference which was a both fun and interesting experience. At the conference were people (mostly professors and teachers) from universities who are interested in e-learning as well as companies (mostly small companies like Collaboraid) excibiting their e-learning solutions. The e-learning market is extremely fragmented. There are more than 150 different e-learning solutions in use in Sweden today, some homegrown, others commercial. What's more is the e-learning systems are all very similar. The most positive thing I took with me from the conference is that people are genuinely interested in Open Source, mostly as a means of saving licencing costs, but still. Open Source emerged as the key selling argument and differentiator of dotLRN.

We are working on merging the dotlrn-1-0 release branch onto the HEAD where the I18N work resides. We are done with the dotlrn package and are working our way through the other packages. The improvements on the OpenACS 4.6 release branch need to be merged onto the trunk as well and I believe Jeff has already done much of this work.

Another task that I feel is important to do as soon as possible is to make dotLRN HEAD use the new portal package. I will check with Open Force what the status of that package is.

As soon as we are done with the merge we will tackle the issue of changing translations to be done on phrases rather than words. We are hoping that we will be able to find a good process for this work and maybe outsource some of it to the most active translators who need these changes.

When setting up our new dotLRN demo server (http://dotlrn.collaboraid.net) for the NetLearning conference I extended the TclWebtest script that sets up dotlrn demo data quite a bit. I am planning to set up four regression testing servers that are recreated from scratch every night for dotLRN (oracle and postgres for dotlrn-1-0 and oracle and postgres for the HEAD). I am hoping that this will help the dotlrn-1-0 testing process and help speed up the release. It will also help us spot bugs that we create on the HEAD early and make sure that dotLRN is installable at all times.

Before christmas we will be working on external authentication (a work that Andrew started) for the Heidelberg university.

Mohan is currently at the Bergen University installing dotLRN and talking about the specific needs that they have on an e-learning system.

News from Heidelberg:

- i18n: we are looking for volunteers (and funding) to help finish the remaining i18n work: fixing problematic message keys/adding timezone support/charset review/more translation and other things that pop up. Collaboraid has created a jewel and now we need some people to start polishing it.

- As Peter mentions above, we have set aside funds for Collaboraid to start on External Authentication. More on this soon.

Steering Group Item:

-DOCUMENTATION: dotLRN now has very basic user level and programmer level documentation (http://dotlrn.org/ ). Both need review. Programmer level documentation should probably be in the standard location for OpenACS packages and user level documentation should be moved into the OpenACS/dotLRN UI where possible. This would allow us to take advantage of the i18n infrastructure for user documentation, while pushing it closer to where it might be needed. Any thoughts or comments on this?

Carl