e-Learning Institute: Drupal Development

So I was playing around with techniques for automatically redirecting someone to a certain drupal page based on the date.  This is important for courses because you can make the landing page push the student into the current week of instruction.  This is currently a hand-coded solution but I'll through it into the instruction designer and can probably finish up that module now (before this technique I had no clue how to deal with dates other then the pain in the butt method of calculating if one date fell within the range of another).  I may release a module that is just a bunch of helper functions that clean up / override parts of the drupal UI to make it more education friendly.  A control panel where you can set how many weeks your course is and then an auto complete field to select what content to redirect to for that week would easily replace this code.

 
//Create an array based on a 15 week course with node id's for each corresponding week to go to
$pages = array(); 
$pages[0] = 1769; 
$pages[1] = 1810; 
$pages[2] = 1812; 
$pages[3] = 1814; 
$pages[4] = 1815; 
$pages[5] = 1813; 
$pages[6] = 1816; 
$pages[7] = 1817; 
$pages[8] = 1819; 
$pages[9] = 1820; 
$pages[10] = 1861; 
$pages[11] = 1821; 
$pages[12] = 1822; 
$pages[13] = 1822; 
$pages[14] = 1823;  
//The magic date W function, this will return a numeric representation of the current week (ie today falls within the 35th week of the year)
$current_date = date('W'); 
//$start_date is pulling in a date from a variable but this could be manually set too
$start_date = variable_get("new_studio_start_date",date('m/d/y')); 
for($i=0; $i<15; $i++){   
if($current_date == date('W',strtotime($start_date ."+". $i ." week"))){     drupal_goto('node/'. $pages[$i]);   
} 
} 
//we're not in a week of the course, just goto the first one
drupal_goto('node/'. $pages[0]); 

So, much like the attack plan for Saturday posted last week I'll lay out the state of several (and growing...) active open projects and the directions that they are taking.  Please feel free to comment to this if you like / dislike the direction I'm taking with anything as I do look to serve the needs of the community as long as it also meets our needs internally (or could, like with Flir).

Assignment Studio

There's been a lot of hustle and bustle around here because of the Fall Semester starting shortly (Monday!) but as CS 3.3 installs on my laptop I'll make an update here to talk about a refining of the direction of our projects and department.  Last week I drew up a small picture to try and diagram what functionality ALL courses should seek to achieve.  This is the new, standardized way that students will interface with our courses.  This is not a standardization in design of the theme or the presentation of materials on the interface, just the structure of the flow of the content.  Once I can I'll take a screenshot of a site before and after this conversion and illustrate why we're doing every piece the way we are.  Some features of the newly established interfaces will include:

So, I've gotten a lot of issues piling up on several modules and after careful consideration of how I want to proceed with some projects (as well as what impact it would have for the e-Learning Institute's work-flow) I've decided to work on the following commits for tomorrow.  This is assuming Drupal CVS is working correctly since it's been kinda flaky lately but here goes:

HTML Export

Another out of no where module,  I've just released a Flir Integration Module for Drupal!  Flir stands for Facelift Image Replacement and allows you to convert text / content within object tags into an image with a given font.  This is a great (and simple) way to spruce up a web interface.  This also allows for sites to be more maintainable because instead of (in our case) developers needing to generate images for headings and then (potentially) changing and recreating them if the heading changes.  Go to Flir's author  Cory Mawhorter (http://mawhorter.net/) and give him some props for how awesome this is!

I've made a pretty big upgrade to the Search and Replace module, adding the ability to do some more very useful and previously unavailable tasks including the following:

• Perform just a search
• Perform a search or search-and-replace of node bodies, node titles, or both
• Perform a case sensitive or insensitive search
• Select All Types button to snag 'em all faster (that degrades away)
• Ability to type %NULL% in the Replace field in order to replace a text string with nothing (as well as trap for accidentally doing it)
• Creates a new revision for each node it modifies
• Creates a log message that states what the search and replace terms are

Announcing the Drupal in Education Handbook! (http://elearning.psu.edu/drupalineducation | original announcement: http://groups.drupal.org/node/13360)  This is an important step forward (I hope) for the community at large because it's the first attempt to explain Drupal through the Prism of education.  It will layout how to go about setting up Drupal sites for Education, why to or not to use Drupal given certain requirements / contexts, what some good modules are to use and for what purpose as well as general information about the community and web technologies in general.  The idea is to be able to create a document that those on the outside looking in at the Drupal community could reference as strong evidence for why to go Drupal in their educational unit.  This road-map, while very ambitious, could be the tipping point needed to get more people in other institutions (or within your own!) to jump on board with Drupal.

I've been brought on as a co-maintainer for Sliced Book Navigation.  It does a lot of what I was just about to create for some of our courses (all...in the future).  Here's what I'm going to be adding to the module as well as a brief as to what it does:

• Splits a book down into individual levels (level 1 gets a block, 2, 3, so on and so forth) (original usage)
• Place sliced book navigation block statically so it appears on any page, not just if it's in the book (new)
• Allow to specify what the spices should be, such as levels 1 and 2 go in a block and levels 3 and on go in another (new)
• Replicate functionality similar to the DHTML menu module so that pages don't have to reload to navigate through a book (new)

This is a proof of concept of the Instruction Designer.  As you can see, you will use the jQuery UI datepicker package to select the start and end date of the course.  This will automatically generate another datepicker calendar in the right most collumn that has the range of months displayed.  This project also uses the outline designer module for the left most collumn so that you can access any structured content you want.