OpenScholar and Social Media Classroom

liquidcms, wow, pretty cool!

I will pass this around among educators. It's an awesome idea, for sure! We can definitely make it an option in Socialmediaclassroom on OpenScholar. Thanks for sharing that.

Update:

I was exploring releasing socialmediaclassroom in Drupal 7. However, I've scrapped that idea and am re-igniting the collaboration with and development on OpenScholar as base for SMC.

I'll be doing most of the development in Github. More to come!

@Ferdi

I think I just realized that vsite is the API starting point that I was looking for.

So, I'd make a forked install .profile and forked .make file, and possibly as of now would load a custom module in place of scholar, which would implement my features. However, the SMC release, if done this way, would also include the entire OpenScholar release, and an user installing would still be able to choose OpenScholar and it would all work as OpenScholar. Not that I want to keep it that way forever, but it gives me a route forward that doesn't hack into OpenScholar's core code.

Ferdi, so far, vsite is working as the API! I will definitely keep you updated. I left a question in an old thread in this group as well about turning on features by default. I can re-iterate here if you'd like?

For the time being, I did make the install profile, and I am making a new module folder in sites/all/modules. When I need extensive customization of any particular part of OS functionality (like features, etc) I am just copying them to the sites/all/modules/socialmediaclassroom folder. I am trying to use as much of OS as possible without changing, and treating it OS code base much like Drupal core itself is treated.

So far, I have merged 2 of the ongoing updates to https://github.com/openscholar/openscholar with my fork of it at https://github.com/samrose/socialmediaclassroom with no problem, so the strategy I am following seems to be working.

Ran into a snag. Turns out that at least for now, I will have to fork the whole collection of modules to keep this clean and allow people to go either the Open Scholar route, or the SMC route.

The reason is that the os core feature and os modules are used by vsite during the installation process, but the os core feature itself has default features for vsites hard coded into it. So, it leaves me having to hack on the os core feature settings in the code too much. I hope this makes sense?

I want to stick with my goal of no hacking on existing Open Scholar code, which means I am going to have to copy all of the features and modules of OS over into a new directory and hack on those in order to create what we need for Social Media Classroom for the short term(we want to be able to turn on other features in sites by default. Plus, we want to be able to create more than one "vsite" per user, etc). This effectively creates a fork of all of the code for OS to create SMC. But I cannot see any other way of doing it.

However, I still very much want to be able to submit the work that I do as contributions to be integrated into Open Scholar, and keep my developments coordinated with Open Scholar developments going forward. So, this is why I really hesitate to just copy all of the code over and create a new track of modules. I'd rather actually just use vsite as the API. Maybe we can connect sometime soon and see if I am wrong about needing to fork all of this? I would love to be wrong... :-)

Hi Richard,

Do I set all sites to use "smc" at:

?

If so, this still has me hacking on the existing OpenScholar code, which I really do not want to do. But, I will do it for now if it helps to prevent forking the rest of the code. I wonder if there is a way to get my install profile script to set that without conflicting with scholarregister.pages.inc ? Also, I wonder if my install profile can be the place where the preset is created instead of os.spaces.inc this way I am not writing onto anything that is OpenScholar release. I am hoping to release SMC as an add-on for OpenScholar code, where the installer of the code could choose to run either the OpenScholar install profile or the Social Media Classroom install profile. If they choose OpenScholar, they end up with exactly what they would get from https://github.com/openscholar/openscholar but if they choose Social media classroom profile, then the Social Media Classroom install profile is able to use the openscholar codebase without modifying any of it, and override where needed to create a new type of vsite. This is going to be a release that I will support over time. I want to keep it synced with OpenScholar development, so I do not want to change or edit any of the OpenScholar code.