This Week's Tweaks | Thursday 29 April 2010 03:42 pm | posting on Thu as taking Fri off to have a nice long weekend with Mon being a bank holiday and the university closed Safety records updated safety records to make the 'options' for each field more consistant. Updated student/staff records to show correct options. classes/ classes sort as per previous post, updated to allow for 'preset' headings to be applied. Bug fix in add/remove classes - could not remove all 'off-cluster' classes. logging update as per previous post, the inc_functions log function updated to allow for more detailed logging by the file_manager tools - will now track upload, move, copy and delete of files. This will aid us in troubleshooting user issues with file uploads (assignments, class content). template website updated to allow for RewriteEngine to make unfriendly "showPage.php?page=blahblah' style url into blahblah.htm (as per SIPBS website). radiation database created 'process' list - list of all functions/forms and reports the new version of the database will have class rep - news edit uploaded fix for class rep news editing - was on DEV, but somehow not managed to upload changes made end Jan 10 to LIVE. file manager disabled moving submitted assignments to pdp / myfiles. They can still be copied quizzes disabled any edits on live quizzes that would break student attempts (e.g. removing questions) or advantage / disadvantage the students who had started (e.g turning off feedback). These changes can be made but the quiz must be taken offline first. altered the feedback on multiple choice questions hopefully making this easier to understand widgets Added a very simple widget for finding buildings on campus using the university map pages and an admin user lookup widget. | comment | class sort & widget-box | Tuesday 27 April 2010 04:55 pm | updated class sort page to allow users to make use of 'preset' sorts - cluster, year and code/name ordering. This is primarily aimed at departmental admn staff who may have dozens of classes in their list, and will set up an automatic set of cluster-year headings (e.g. bioscience - year 1, bioscience -year 2 etc) to help quickly organise large lists of classes. Widget-box now has a refresh button to fix page stalls encountered by some users | comment | logging update | Monday 26 April 2010 04:41 pm | log_event function in inc_functions updated to capture file_manager events (upload, move, copy, delete) to make log analysis of file_manager possible. | comment | This Week's Tweaks | Friday 23 April 2010 04:39 pm | SCRIPT tutor updated 'tests' tool to allow for archiving of old tests. Updated staff 'class view' of results to account for archives. assignments reworked the receipts code so that its easier to add in cc to departmental contact for late assignments (updated myAssignments, file_manager/files) file name length updated the max file name length from 39 to 90. Not sure why it was so short (maybe trying to be convervative with database space back in the late 90s?). Updates to db tables (content: link) and include/file_handler and file_manager/config. class rep polls the class rep tools have been updated to include class polls. Also update the poll tool to allow for up to 10 options and improved the 'completed polls' page to have filters and date limits. discussions 'locked' class discussions are now private for those on the class list/ teaching on the class. PG DB updated student reports to better indicate month deadlines for each report associated with the student quizzes updated quizzes so that cannot make changes to a quiz that impact live/saved/ in-progress quizzes e.g. changing number of questions in a quiz would cause saved quizzes with more/less questions to not reload. Users can no longer remove/add questions or change a quiz format from formal/ self assessment without warning/ confirmation. bookings tool now exports to .csv format widget-bar tweaks and updates to try and resolve bugs experienced by testers radiation database v2 created new data structure for v2 db on DEV server. Created use-case docs. | comment | UVLE & Portal - latest progress | Wednesday 21 April 2010 03:19 pm | the portal side of the unified VLE has been making steady progress over the last few months. We've visited the University of Edinburgh as well as St. Andrews to see their uPortal installations in action. Edinburgh have a very mature setup, having used uPortal for a number of years to provide portal services to applicants, students, staff, alumni and guests. The portal is strongly embedded into their IT culture, with users and providers alike making extensive use of the system as a platform for communication and information, with an impressive array of 'widgets' available ranging from news feeds, timetabling and VLE through to finance and personal data management. St. Andrews have just launched the student version of their portal and are hoping to build on its success with portals for staff and others. Both institutions have been very helpful, providing us with their insight, expertise and experience of managing their portals.
Taking our lead from these institutions, the portal evaluation group have set up a basic uPortal server so we can evaluate it more fully and try adding 'widgets' of our own. uPortal appears very flexible, if a bit complex 'under the bonnet' (its been a long time since I've done much with Java and Tomcat, so I've left that to others with more expertise in these technologies in the group), so while they get to grip with the install and configuration, I've been working on content provision, creating a couple of SPIDER widgets. These allow uPortal to display a user's custom classes and news feeds (click on thumbnail below for a screen shot).
Once I had a grasp on how uPortal's widget administration works, I configured these widgets which now work well, pulling live class/news data directly from SPIDER. Together with the two Michaels, we're planning on creating a widget format (probably based on Atom/RSS) that can combine the data from Moodle (Core VLE) and SPIDER together, so we can present unified "class" and "news" widgets, and potentially many more. uPortal looks to be a very promising system which should provide a good framework for a portal to both unify the VLE systems and act as a 'front door' to many other university web systems. see http://support.learnonline.strath.ac.uk/updates/ for the latest on the unified VLE project. | comment | content file name length | Wednesday 21 April 2010 02:36 pm | updated character length of class files to 90 characters (updated inc_functions/cleanFileName limit to 90 and db content: link from 150 to 300) | comment | discussion update | Tuesday 20 April 2010 01:03 pm | Class discussion for classes that are 'class list limited' are now also restricted to the students in the class + teaching staff. Previous to this, they were open, which kind of contradicted the notion of the class being restricted. | comment | This Week's Tweaks | Friday 16 April 2010 04:41 pm | Research admin fixed a series of bugs in the travel awards application tools (files not uploading at all) and ended up overhauling all the logic in the whole script. Polls updated polls to be accesible to class rep users. Testing on DEV server, ready to go I think, but will hold off putting on live until Monday in case any bugs crop up. Safety/ Radiation updated Safety tools home page to use tabs - should be a bit easier to use as its now better organised. Moved the Safety Records database out of the Research Admin tools (not sure why it was there...) and updated it to work with standard admin/user access rights. Started to spec the "radiation database v2". Even put together a Gant chart in MS Project listing the main tasks required. Initial table design done, will implement on DEV next week and start to recode the main scripts. Metabolomics set up a template site for the Metabolomics research group. Bugs: Class > Category download & Class sort Fixed bug in category download zip that was missing files with a deactivation date. Fixed bugs in auto-update of classes and myClasses that was messing up when users had headings for their classes. Thanks to nataku for spotting these issues. Widget bar the Widget bar (beta) is now on live SPIDER, available as an option in mySettings for the buttons and menus navigation interfaces (not available in classic or text only mode). The widget bar allows you to add a set of up to 5 tabs of widgets that can contain any number of SPIDER based widgets (blog, classes, FAQ, news etc) as well as external widgets (gmail, twitter, digg, facebook, google etc), news feeds (SPIDER, BBC, slashdot) or any external URL/ rss feed that you want to add. | comment |
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