DevMeetingChristmas2004

From Dokeos

The last developer meeting of the year 2004was held on December 14th, at Ghent University, 10AM. A meeting summary will follow soon.

Below are the agenda points (with low/medium/high priority ranking).

1 Date planning
2 Focus
3 Meeting proposal
- 3.1 Community
- 3.2 Development

Date planning

suggested dates are 13, 14, 20, 21 december

Thomas Depraetere can come all 4 dates
Roan Embrechts can come all 4 dates
Jean-Marie Maes cannot come 13, 14 dec
Rene Haentjens prefers 13, 14 dec
Koen Vanmeerbeek cannot come 21 dec
Bart Mollet can come all 4 dates
Michel Panckoucke cannot come 21 dec
Vanbillemont Stefaan will not attend the meeting
UGent team prefers 14 dec (we want to act as host for the meeting)

Proposal: 14 december. Jean-Marie Maes cannot come then, but he has been present last two meetings, both of which Rene Haentjens could not come, so it seems fair to pick a date outside Renes vacation this time.

To all people who cannot come: you are encouraged to add all your considerations to this wiki!

Focus

This is going to be a development meeting concerning technical issues. We often mix technical discussions and discussions about our vision on a certain topic. We'll focus this meeting on the technical aspects, because we need more time for them.

Presentations of all the new developments: roadmap and Contributions not in the cvs. Everyone who has a development ready to integrate in the CVS should make a small presentation about the development: why should we add it?, how does it work? (using a live example if possible), what changes in dokeos (code + database), final remarks (possible improvements, ...)

Meeting proposal

There are a lot of topics to be discussed. Each topic should take a little time as possible. When there is a name next to the topic this means that this user can give a quick overview of what it is about and if possible what has to be changed in the code / database to achieve this. If it is a development that is ready we can decide wether we add it to the CVS or not. We prefer concensus, otherwise it'll have to come to a vote.

Community

Plan release schedule, e.g. unstable testrelease every two months starting January, aim for stable Dokeos release June 2004. Maybe we should only release when there is something to release (=ad hoc)
CVS: two branches. Many people have suggested to create two CVS branches, a stable and an unstable one. Can we all agree on this, who will explain the new way of working to all developers...
CVS: When do we add new developments/features to the CVS
CVS edit procedure. When should new developments be added to the CVS. Maybe the following proposal is a good working procedure.
1. when you start a new development you start a thread on the forum stating why you want to add this, what has to be changed in the dokeos code (new table, fields, ...), if possible and relevant a screenshot of the GUI (this can be done by creating a simple html page). The reason is that you might get valuable feedback from the community or interesting pointers
2. when the development is ready you can post the code and/or forsee a testing server
3. in the next developments meeting the developpers gives a quick presentation about the new development (the need, the code and/or database changes, a working demo)
4. developpers do a final discussion and we pass to a vote: "should we add this to the CVS?"
5. if the majority of the developpers is in favor the development can be added to the CVS

Important: this only applies to NEW (or changed) developments and features(new/changed features). Bugfixes can off course be added immediately.

Do we announce the wiki as the official documents medium (roadmap, FAQ, ...), if so, do we limit the writing rights?

Development

Presentation by Thomas (Dokeos Client Developments)
database refactoring
- database, table, field names: how do we use them in our scripts?
- remove obsolete tables and fields
- renaming of fields (and tables)
- resizing of fields
- unique course and user key
- multiple and/or single database modes
- support for other databases
- Foreign key integrety refactoring
- Course database refactoring = unified table structure: (forum, resource properties (see Group based agenda), ... )
Dokeos Language Translation Tool (Patrick)(vote)
Improved quota system (Roan)
CSS (style switcher) (Patrick)(vote)
Language selection menu (Patrick)(vote)
File Structure (Roan)(vote)
Group based Agenda (Patrick)(vote)
Personal Agenda (Patrick)(vote)
My Agenda (Patrick)(vote)
Announcements (Patrick)
Web adjustable config settings (Roan, Jan)
- Platform: allow_self_registration, lost_password, is_trackingEnabled, SiteName, Rootweb, administratorName, allowSelfRegProf, �
- Course: permission of tool, course stylesheet, course_subscription_allowed, default_student_publication_visibility,
- User: user_style_sheet
Virtual Course support (Roan)
Metadata for documents (Ren�): forum 2152 and 1428, in CVS (vote)
Search documents by keyword (Ren�): forum 1509 and 572, in CVS, see also Metadata
Who's online (Thomas) (vote)
Login Page customisation (Thomas)
Course copy & recycle (bart)(vote)
admin: login as different user (roan)
groups & users: overview and export (Patrick) (vote)
course sorting (Patrick)
System announcements (Bart)
HtmlArea: spell checker
Dropbox feedback (Ren�): forum 2831, in CVS
edit course homepage link (Ren�): forum 2698, in CVS
security: no global variables -> cleanup claro_init_global.inc.php (patrick): Remove "Register GET variables into $GLOBALS" and "Register POST variables into $GLOBALS" from claro_ini_global.inc.php because this causes serious security threats.
group comments (patrick)(vote)
sorting: API?
hiding/activating tools: consistency
tool introduction
import links using a CSV file (Ren�): forum 2645, in CVS
subadmin (Hogent)
mod_rewrite vs AcceptPathInfo
group categories (Hogent)
consistency: creation
LaTex
session problems (a large amount of all the bug reports are related to sessions)
Improved visibility system (Roan)
Plugins and modularity of code
final: a quick scan through the wiki to chack if we have forgotten topics