Posted by dakala on April 9, 2007 at 4:17pm
Hi All,
I've been working on phpEdu - a web-based educational management system for tertiary instituitions for years but early this year, started porting it to Drupal. Beta 1 is out and you may see it in action at http://www.phpedu.org.uk. Beta 2 is due for release very soon.
Modules written for phpEdu on the site include faculty, program, admission, courses (including course wishlist and registration), quiz( 3 question types) and assignment. Others planned include timetable(event), attendance, results etc
There's a lot going on in the DrupalEd group and I believe there's more than enough room for collaboration without reinventing the wheel.
Comments
Question on install
Hi, I have a question on the install that you have here:
http://www.phpedu.org.uk/public/phpedu-beta.tar.gz
It looks to me to be drupal 5.x with some extra sql install files and install instructions for the database. Is there no module for this?
It would be great to have files necessary for just phpedu for those of us who already have drupal installed. The database install script has it to where certain tables will be dropped and recreated that appear to be part of drupal core.
It would also be really great to have the files available under drupal.org as a project.
Re: Question on install
All phpEdu and Drupal contrib modules are under the /sites/default/modules directory.
Yes, as explained in the install notes, for this first beta release, I've included loads of test data so that developers can quickly do the install and play around. At the moment, it's not advisable to install the phpEdu specific modules into an existent Drupal setup. Later, the install process will definitely change to take care of this.
There are a number of things involved in a specialized LMS application which I believe might have been discussed here. A good indication is in the name of this group - DrupalEd Distribution (drupaled-distro) - which I understand in a similar light as Linux distros: Gentoo, Ubuntu, Fedora Core etc. Making phpEdu modules available as standalone modules might not be a good idea. Of course, I may be mistaken on this.
I've got a developer account on drupal.org and at some point along the line of the development process, phpEdu modules will be made available with a list of extra contrib modules required by phpEdu. But I'm open to other ideas for collaboration.
Please get those modules in
Please get those modules in to Drupal CVS ASAP. Some of us really want to dig in to them. :P
You mentioned porting this code to Drupal. How much of it is wrapped by Drupal, an how much of it has been converted to the Drupal way of things?
Will you be open to modifying your modules if they are too task specific? We have a lot of people that want to do many variations of LMS.
~Rob
Re: Please get those modules in
Of course, I intend to commit the modules ASAP. Now every bit of the code is Drupal. I should have said it's a rewrite of the old code which was an extension of a portal I wrote. I'm open to collaboration/cooperation. The main reason I've kept away from this group is to have something tangible to show for the hours of development work so far before showing up.
If phpEdu can help others do different kinds of LMS, so be it. What I intend to do in the next few days is intensify my reading of previous posts here to get familiar with others' ideas. Anyway, I'd be delighted if guys take a look at phpEdu and want to talk.
Test Data
The idea to have some sample data to test the various features without having to manually create 4 classes with 20 students each is great, but not all users will want that data. It would probably be better to provide a separate sql file that can be loaded on demand.