Have you heard of Home box?

Posted by btopro on June 8, 2010 at 5:00am

Some food for thought -- Home Box is an incredibly easy to configure Dashboard creation module. I'm only posting here because I think this could be a great landing page for Drupal as an LMS. Anything that's a block can show up in a homebox display and it seems very flexible / stable from my early usage of it. You can also make multiple dashboards (different one for students vs. instructors vs. admin staff).

I'm going to be integrating it into the default module set that runs with ELMS so that students can see how far along they are in a course, what pages they've book marked, where they left sticky notes, where they last left off, course announcements, and what assignments they've submitted. Thank goodness for Views-block integration :) we can pretty much put out anything we want to the display and the roadmap for version 2 sounds really promising as well.

Linkage: http://drupal.org/project/homebox

Comments

Spaces Dashboard

Posted by kyle_mathews on June 8, 2010 at 6:02am

I'm building Spaces Dashboard into Eduglu as I'm using the full devseed stack, spaces / context / features. It works pretty well for my needs and makes it very easy to add customizable exportable default dashboards and let's users build their own custom dashboards as needs be. A big negative is as of right now, you can easily add widgets from other platforms. But I'd imagine that wouldn't be too hard to fix. I haven't investigated this space that much though however.

HomeBox does look very interesting. Especially the 2.x branch as it's exportable w/ feature integration. See this thread for example http://drupal.org/node/794728

Kyle Mathews

Homebox needs Context Integration

Posted by bramface on June 8, 2010 at 2:31pm

YES: Drupal needs to be a Portal management tool like NetVibes. The single sign-on with Moodle is great - we need modules to do single sign-on with all the other systems our schools use, so they'll adopt it as the overall portal page, I think, as a usability feature: one page to connect to all intranet apps.

But HomeBox is not there yet. Right now users need to play with all the D6-era block management tools - way too complex.

If you look at how Lullabot handles block management with Buzzr, that's what it needs to be feel for a user to create "widgets" with Homebox.

Hope someone does!

-Bram

http://gamefacewebdesign.com