My video presentation, make sure you check the HD version.

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Sorry it took so long, I had some problems with the uploading and all that jazz.
Make sure you visit the IRC channel on 2nd of Sept. where Ben and I will be showcasing stuff we wrote, asking questions and giving feedback about our GSoC2011 experience. 🙂

learn.wordpress.org project codebase is ready and can be deployed anytime.

During last weeks I continuously tested everything using latest BuddyPress trunk, that’s why I didn’t report any updates. I can’t wait to see BuddyPress 1.5 released so I could tag Courseware with a stable version.

Beside all this I:

• Added interface tweaks to get rid of any `groups` namespace in favour of `classes`
• Fixed most of the components with the new theme
• Tested different deployment situations, including missing/inactive components
• Fixed a bunch of localization strings

The code is available from trac. I would not like to jump ahead, but the project release itself will probably be scheduled only after BuddyPress is getting released.

By judging the codebase changes (using first revision after some file renames), I got this short stat:

g diff 2c3ca5b master --stat
 activity/activity.class.php                        |   46 +-
 assignments/assignments.class.php                  |  138 ++-
 assignments/formbuilder.class.php                  |  366 ++++++
 bibliography/bibliography.class.php                |   21 -
 courses/courses.class.php                          |  194 +---
 courses/courses.us.class.php                       |  198 ---
 courseware.php                                     |   69 +-
 dashboards/dashboards.class.php                    |   20 +-
 gradebook/gradebook.class.php                      |   48 +-
 groups/groups.class.php                            |   12 +-
 groups/templates/_bibs.php                         |   10 +-
 groups/templates/_course_group_header.php          |   17 -
 groups/templates/_lectures.php                     |   18 +
 groups/templates/_no_course_group_header.php       |    4 +-
 groups/templates/_responses.php                    |    2 +-
 groups/templates/add_response.php                  |   58 +-
 groups/templates/edit_assignment.php               |   90 +-
 groups/templates/edit_bibliography.php             |    8 +-
 groups/templates/edit_course.php                   |    5 +-
 groups/templates/edit_lecture.php                  |   66 +
 groups/templates/edit_schedule.php                 |   69 +-
 groups/templates/gradebook.php                     |    6 +-
 groups/templates/home.php                          |  119 +--
 groups/templates/list_assignments.php              |   15 +-
 groups/templates/list_courses.php                  |   45 -
 groups/templates/list_schedules.php                |    2 +-
 groups/templates/new_assignment.php                |   62 +-
 groups/templates/new_bibliography.php              |    4 +-
 groups/templates/new_course.php                    |   32 -
 groups/templates/new_lecture.php                   |   61 +
 groups/templates/new_schedule.php                  |   72 +-
 groups/templates/single_assignment.php             |   39 +-
 groups/templates/single_course.php                 |    8 +-
 groups/templates/single_lecture.php                |   52 +
 groups/templates/single_response.php               |   24 +-
 groups/templates/single_schedule.php               |   14 +-
 languages/bpsp-fr_FR.mo                            |  Bin 0 -> 22052 bytes
 languages/bpsp-fr_FR.po                            | 1028 ++++++++++++++++
 lectures/lectures.class.php                        |  636 ++++++++++
 readme.txt                                         |    3 +
 responses/responses.class.php                      |  154 +++-
 roles/roles.class.php                              |   21 +-
 schedules/schedules.class.php                      |   45 +-
 static/css/courseware-editor.css                   |   10 +-
 static/css/courseware.css                          |  109 ++-
 static/css/formbuilder/jquery.formbuilder.css      |  117 ++
 .../theme/smoothness/jquery-ui-custom.css          |   13 +
 static/js/bibliographies.js                        |   46 -
 static/js/bibliography.js                          |   45 +
 static/js/courseware-editor.js                     |    4 +-
 static/js/edit-assignment.js                       |   15 +
 static/js/formbuilder/jquery.formbuilder.js        |  533 ++++++++
 static/js/gradebook.js                             |    1 -
 static/js/group-dashboard.js                       |    3 +-
 static/js/jstree/jquery.jstree.js                  | 1266 ++++++++++++++++++++
 static/js/lectures.js                              |   46 +
 static/js/list-assignments.js                      |    9 +-
 static/js/list-courses.js                          |   18 -
 static/js/list-schedules.js                        |    7 +-
 static/js/new-assignment.js                        |   14 +
 static/js/schedules.js                             |    8 +-
 static/js/sparkline/jquery.sparkline.min.js        |  163 ++--
 static/static.class.php                            |   81 +-
 wordpress/templates/admin.php                      |   48 -
 wordpress/wordpress.class.php                      |   39 +-
 65 files changed, 5421 insertions(+), 1075 deletions(-)

To mention some of the challenges of this year:

• Designing a quizzes component to include all the WordPress API features support
• Working with the post type hierarchies
• Working with the uploads backend
• Integration with the legendary TinyMCE (Zen Mode & all that jazz)
• Gettext integration for custom words
• Working with the awesome @clioweb, @johnjamesjacoby and some of his team members

I wanted to thank the WordPress/BuddyPress team for accepting me this year with my favourite plugin, Courseware, my mentors and colleagues and the awesome community for all the support and feedback.

What’s next…
Even though this GSoC is over (almost), I will stick around waiting for a chance to work with the core team on deploying my code. Also, as it happened last year, I will continue supporting the work I’ve done so far, and will try to help as much as I can this great projects.

See you around.
Everyone good luck on final evaluations!

Sorry for the belated report,
I took a week off and went hiking, found some Internet just now.

This week I spent some time reviewing Courseware codebase with upcoming BuddyPress 1.5 API changes. I also took some time helping/responding to community questions about Courseware API.

On the other side, the learn.wordpress.org theme is almost fully checked with the new styling changes of 1.5, and is waiting for the final evaluation (probably sometime the upcoming week).

We have a pre-final term in a week, so good luck to everyone the upcoming week!

Mathematicians and physicians rejoice, you got full MathJax support with Courseware!

During last week I wrote an in details post about what was achieved during this midterm. Courseware got featured on wpmu.org. I received some feedback from early testers, things that I fixed (like support for Tamil or other languages of such kind and ability to add embeds into quiz questions, last one thanks to @Viper), a new localisation: French and some BuddyPress 1.3 bugs fixed.

Tomorrow there’s an IRC chat scheduled for discussing further details. For this second part of GSoC I plan to help where I can test BuddyPress, and work closer with @lamejjj and @jane on the .org specific tasks.

There was an interesting question about SCORM support in Courseware: well, right now, the answer is NO, but all this just because SCORM is only a data exchange format, and while Courseware follows the learning object model proposed and used by SCORM, writing the SCORM support layer is a matter of time and not a GSoC task priority!

My initial workflow proposal is mainly finished The…

My initial workflow proposal is mainly finished. The only thing that left is the diploma/certificate functionality, the decision for, I hope we will take tomorrow. Initially I proposed to generate pdf, which is wrong if placed in the context of 1.000k userbase (the server load, and resource consumption, will be waisted with no big reason). So, right now I have done all the backend support, what left is how we are going to serve the user course coverage information.

Also this week:

• lots of UI improvements to fit into the .org UI/UX
• rewrote part of the validations system for quizzes (md5 over sanitize_title()), you can ask me in the comments about this if you are interested about how to design a form-builder and a validation tool for it 😛
• added progress indicator, based on number of quizzes taken/submitted responses
• added an interesting bookmarking tool, now you can always bookmark the lecture you left at, and pick it up anytime later directly from your dashboard
• Courseware has uploads integrated into most of its components (so far 6), an in-depth check of how uploads work in WordPress can scare any teacher/user that cares about his submitted files or anybody else who needs flexibility about allowed file types or wants to disable/enable uploads. So I wrote a simple tool to deal with all that stuff, called uploads. Used with Courseware, we can hide/mask download file location, disable downloads or simply add new allowed file types. To solve the problem with a portable encrypting algorithm, I used an interesting combination of basic base64 decoder/encoder along with NONCE_KEY value, worth checking line 164.

Tomorrow around 19:30 UTC, my team is getting together on IRC (#wordpress-gsoc) to talk about current and additional learn.wordpress.org specifications. People that would like to ask/leave some feedback, can jump in and ping us.

Thanks. And good luck everyone this midterm.

A bit late, but with “Good news everyone” 🙂

Some issues:

• typography is still not complete
• buttons might look not integrated
• footer is not consistent like the one from current .org

So polishing comes along.

Oh, and did you notice the icons. The icons!!! 🙂

You can play with it at cw.rivalry.nerd.ro (it’s my ddns-ed laptop so don’t blame me if it’s down). Try user: test with passowrd: x

Last days a lot of time was spent on the UI details.

• There’s a list of >20 commits with small and big improvements.
• A better integration with lectures and quizzes was done.
• I started working on the new theme, though right now it’s mostly broken
• An official feature freeze was announced by @lamejjj, so right now I’m a full time front-end developer rather than just a coder.

The IRC meetup went OK, found some bugs, squashed some of those, most of the feedback was positive and constructive.

P.S.: Once again, sorry for being late, beside gsoc and courseware, some exciting things happens to me right now, some friends and I are opening a co-working place 😛

The new quizzes and tests component is ready, I’m working on final touches, mostly regarding responses integration.

I also received a theme package from @lamejjj to start working on the learn.wordpress.org project. So for the next week I will introduce you to:

• a sandbox with deployed Courseware for learn.wordpress.org
• a new BuddyPress theme with fixes that will cover UI/UX aspects specially to make easier adoption of the LMS for newcomers
• a detailed report from UI/UX team on what things have to be polished, components we are going to use (this, if only I get a window scheduled until my report deadline)

Also @clioweb promised me some help with the UI/UX parts of the project (feedback and detailed revisions) so I’m thinking seriously to announce an IRC chat on #scholarpress, maybe some other people want to jump in.

Sorry for such a late report, but I decided to get back on track with my tasks before I write any reports this week. I kinda succeed, now I got some interesting videos with the new lectures and assignment (quiz/tests) components.

While the lectures are ready, and power up the courseware content in a handbook style…

the assignments component is still in work, though I like the progress, and I hope to finish a beta version by tomorrow…

Some challenges and interesting details you might be interested about:

• the biggest challenge with the lectures was the back and forth navigation, lucky me hacker, I accidentally found a core function that actually saved me a couple of good hours: the get_page_hierarchy() (solves the pages ordering by running in a O(N) complexity)
• another challenge was the new proposed quizzes/tests UI, after some feedback from @clioweb we decided to opt for a more server-side solution, on the base of what a JavaScript UI would be much easier to write. Later I found jquery.formbuilder plugin, that suits us perfectly to generate form elements. I forked it and to fix some bugs, add localization support, possible answer(s) fields, and json backend.

On upcoming week, once I finish the new assignment component, I will start working on the learn.wordpress.org features. That, by starting with a clean theme, focused less on social interaction and more on content/ease of use of the website. By the end of next week, I plan to get in touch with the UI theme for an in detail review of the current Coureware UI/UX parts, both for teachers and users. The task with the certification/diploma download part is merged into learn.wordpress.org todo list, because the quizzes/tests feature will offer hooks for the results page, so it will use that functionality.