Bryan Ruby

Perhaps because I like to think of myself as a constant learner, I like to keep keep my eyes open for what is happening with learning/course management systems. CMS Report has been covering Moodle since the early days of our website and I believe it to be one of the more popular open source LMS out there. Moodle 2.0 is currently under development and with an estimated release date of July 20, 2010.

Although Moodle 2.0 hasn't been officially released, the developers did reach important milestones this month with the release of Moodle 2.0 Preview 1 and  Preview 2. These previews give you an idea just how all the new features and improvements are coming together for the next release of Moodle. There are a ton of new features and improvements coming to Moodle to be excited about. Below is a list of major new features we've gleamed of the Moodle 2.0 release notes.

• Community Hubs - Anybody can set up a Community Hub, which is a directory of courses for public use or for private communities. The code is implemented as separate GPL plugin for Moodle.
• Repository Support - Moodle now supports integration with external repositories of content, making it really simple to bring documents and media into Moodle via an AJAX interface that looks like a standard Open dialogue in desktop applications.
• Portfolio Support - Modules can now export their data to external systems, particularly useful for portfolios where snapshots of forums, assignments and other things in Moodle are useful to record in a journal or a portfolio of evidence
• Completion -  Teachers can now specify conditions that define when any activity or course is seen as completed by a student.
• Conditional activities - Access to activities can be restricted based on certain criteria, such as dates, grade obtained, or the completion of another activity.
• Cohorts - Also known as "Site-wide groups", these are site-wide collections of users that can be enrolled into courses in one action, either manually or synchronized automatically
• Web Services Support - Support for standards-based web services across the entire Moodle code base, allowing the admin to expose particular functions of Moodle for use by: 1) Administrative systems such as HR or SIS applications and 2) Mobile clients.
• IMS Common Cartridge - Moodle can now import courses in IMS Common Cartridge format (commonly used by publishers)
• New blocks - Comments block, Private files block, Community block, and Completion block.

Moodle 2.0 Preview 2 can be dowloaded from the Moodle download server.

After two years of spam protection by Mollom people are beginning to proudly show off their ham/spam stats. Davy Van Den Bremt over at Drupal coder writes:

If you're happy about Mollom, just shout it out on Twitter, Facebook, your blog, ... by putting up a screenshot of your stats and saying how many spam has been caught by Mollom. You can find the stats of your site on your Mollom account. If you're using Drupal, you can find them under Administer > Reports > Mollom Statistics.

If you're using Twitter, use the hashtag #mollomstats. I'm looking forward see how much crap content Mollom has spared us from.

SilverStripe 2.4 was released this week. According to Brian Calhoun, SilverStripe CEO, this release is an important milestone for the open source CMS.

We're excited to tell you that we just released SilverStripe version 2.4! This is a major new release and an important milestone for the SilverStripe community, the open source project, and our company.

SilverStripe 2.4 is the culmination of over a year's worth of development. We fixed 391 tickets and had over 1,400 changelog entries. A large number of the patches that went into 2.4 have come from you, the community, and we're especially happy that there's been increasing community involvement.

What are the enterprise trends in content management? This past month, I've given a lot of thought on the evolution of content management and social media in large organizations. Perhaps the amount of time I've recently spent on the plane traveling both coasts of the United States gave me too much reflecting time on this subject. Most of us understand the impact Enterprise 2.0 has had on enterprise content management, yet I feel like we're missing pieces to the puzzle. Luckily, there are a lot of smart people out there giving us clues to what the current enterprise trends are with content management.

A new point release, CMS Made Simple 1.7.1, was released over the weekend. This version of CMSMS fixes numerous minor bugs and adds some important features. Some of the significant new features included in this release are:

• Better support for SSL
• API changes that allow for any form element created by a module (form tag, text input, checkbox etc) to have classes associated with the tag. This will make it much easier for designers to style forms.
• Added preferences to control the default image manager thumbnail size instead of having to edit a config file.
• TinyMCE has been upgraded to the latest version.

"The fact is, however, that major IT projects are inevitably going to be about business change, and the two have to go hand in hand. As it continues its steady evolution, IT becomes less and less about individual products, languages or whatever, and more about getting things to work together."

-Jon Collins, Freeform Dynamics, Organisational Change and IT: More than a bar-room conversation?, The Register, April 28, 2010

Tim O'Reilly is the Tuesday keynote speaker at DrupalCon 2010. His talk was on open source in the cloud era. I had some WiFi issues that slowed my typing down so I've embedded the his slide presentation at the end of this post.

2:30 PM: What is wrong with government? "We need to do more than shake the vending machine." O'Reilly is giving examples of people doing things themselves. Do it yourself on a civic scale...the heart of Gov 2.0. Drupal is an example of do it yourself spirit. O'Reilly's putting Drupal back into the speech on how people come together to build something better.

Dries Buytaert, Drupal Project Lead, will give his bi-annual State of Drupal talk in the beginning of DrupalCon SF, where he’ll discuss where Drupal is and where it is going. In particular, he’ll discuss Drupal 7, usability, the Drupal.org redesign, and other developments to Drupal.

CMS Report is here live at Drupal Con and we'll be blogging about the presentation as we hear it.

Edited: Video from the keynote speech has also been embedded at the end of this post. This video can also be found at archive.org.

I spent Sunday flying to San Francisco for this year's DrupalCon. Attending this Drupal conference is a first for me. For the past few years. I've wanted to attend the conference but either personal or professional distractions came up that prevented me from attending the conference. This year is my year for DrupalCon and I'm anxious to get to know the Drupal community better than I have in the past.

Five years ago, my wife and I had a dream. Together, we wanted to start a blog called "Like that Idea" and so we registered the domain LikethatIdea.com. The idea for the WordPress blog was to have a site where we could identify and review neat ideas which we thought others would like to read about. The ideas came in the form of products, books, movies, services, and interesting article that we read ourselves. In the end though, we ran out of ideas to write about and the site never really took off.

By the time many of you read this post, Like that Idea will be never more. I'm currently working on wiping the site off the server. It's time to say goodbye to one of the few joint Internet projects that my wife and I worked on together. Instead, we'll use the time to work on our own personal projects as well as working jointly on the biggest project of our lifetime, our family.

Below the fold is a post I couldn't help but transfer from LikethatIdea.com over to this site. Thinking back at this moment in time still puts a smile on my face.