Posted by jimtobias on November 29, 2009 at 5:47pm
Hi,
I posted http://drupal.org/node/633972 in the forum, looking for help, but got only generic replies. We need someone who understands Drupal and how it can be used in training (not "education").
Most of the help would be in identifying the right modules to duplicate the functionality we've already got, avoiding gotchas, identifying where we might need to do some coding, and how to theme the training site so it's both accessible and looks good.
One item that comes up is whether we should use the Book content type, with what additional modules, and how to integrate it with Quiz.
Thanks for any leads.
Comments
more information?
I think the reason you got generic replies is that there isn't much detail about the functionality of your existing php site. Integrating the Book module with the quiz can be trivial (allow the quiz content type to be a book page) or rather difficult (impose book-style navigation between quiz questions?).
For what it's worth, I get the distinction between training and education, and I'd be interested in putting in a bid if I knew a bit more about what it entails.
probably right...
Thanks, Becky.
You're probably right about my posting. I was only looking people who have at least some background in education/training, but all I got was DrupalDrupalDrupal. So here's some more detail.
The current site allows us to customize a training course for a client. We can use their logo on the home page and add some material specific to them on any page. The individual training segments are assembled into courses depending on the trainee's job responsibilities, too -- an engineer gets segments 1,2,6,7,8; a manager gets segments 1,2,4,5,9, etc. You can ask a question on any page, and the page gets put into the email subject line.
Aside from those features, I think it's pretty straightforward. Trainees go through segments, get quizzed, go on to the next segment.
Our current segments would become Book chapters, I guess, with quizzes as the last page(s) of each chapter. We'd clone Books and chapters to do the customization. Complicated scoring outcomes and making sure people stay on their assigned chapters are not important.
The theme will be important, both to make the content look right and to assure high levels of accessibility.
If possible, we'd like to automate the migration somehow, taking all our current pages (~200) with text and Flash and other media and making Book pages out of them in order. That might be done with a PHP script somehow. Doing it manually might take 10 hours or so.
Open Atrium-ish
Hia, I believe we're doing something similar, and we have decided to base it on the modules that power Open Atrium, that is Organic Groups and Spaces to create "rooms" (sections / courses with their own design elements, content and users etc), and Features + Context to turn on and off tools for these rooms. We'll use the book and quiz modules for content and tests.
So, If I were you I'd give Open Atrium a test run to see if that general approach could be used for your site. If so you would probably be able to be more specific in what you wish developed, like: a feature that does x and y for roles a and b etc.. -> http://www.openatrium.org
questions
On your existing site, are your pages generated dynamically from a database? If so, writing a script to churn out book pages is probably very easy. If not, any predictable structure would help. Are the pages templated in any way?
On the theming front, your best bet is almost certainly to start with an existing drupal theme that has the accessibility features you need. You might want to start with this list: http://openconcept.ca/blog/mgifford/function_assessment_of_valid_drupal_.... I can not vouch for any of those themes personally, at least, not insofar as accessibility is concerned. Also, I am not much of an artist, so I can't help you with making an accessible theme look good...I can't even make inaccessible themes look good! However, you might find that the originator of any of the accessible themes would be willing to customize it for a reasonable fee. It is at least worth asking them.
The email thing is probably trivial. I'm thinking your existing method of generating the emails would probably transfer to Drupal without much fuss and bother.
There is a neat module called Context or possibly Contexts which might be the easiest way to spin out role-based variations for managers vs engineers, etc. Organic Groups is fine too. Domain access may be the easiest way to customize sites for different clients. You can combine Domain Access with Context or OG. In fact, you can combine them all, but that is probably overkill.