[Server-devel] Edublog notes (was: Re: The road towards xs-0.3 - update)

Greg Smith (gregmsmi) gregmsmi at cisco.com
Mon Jun 2 17:09:28 EDT 2008


Hi Martin et al,

Thanks. 

Sanity check on our high level concept.

The core idea of this software is to present an easy to use interface so
kids can post to blogs. Enter text, click post you are done.

The output of that goes to any supported blog (e.g. Grade 1 home blog on
Moodle, Blogger.com, Drupal, or wordpress etc.).

Beyond that you can save, edit content, approve before its posted.

Its middleware meant to address these concerns:
- You have to create a google account for each user (now, as it accepts
OpenId it might be easier...)
- If you have different blogs, children get confused with the "new post"
option.
- follow the steps for making a new post since you get connected to the
internet, and you'll see there are a lot. It doesn't mean it can't be
taught, but usability could be much better for children usage.
- It's not easy for teachers to take a look at posts before being
published. 

EduBlog is a clean front end to existing blog tools. If kids or anyone
else is comfortable going directly to the relevant blog, logging in and
posting directly, that's OK too.

Let me know if you have any comments or questions and I hope its clear
now we are not building another blog hosting system.

Back to the DB. The EduBlog web app needs a table to store its own info
(e.g. configured blog URLs, blog user name/pass, posts submitted but not
approved by teacher, options set for each student, etc.). Should we
store that in the same DB that moodle is already using and just create
some new tables or should we create a new DB for our own use?

In the future we may want to run a query on the moodle DB and web app
DB. E.g. get user name, class and school from Moodle DB then look up
configured blogs in web app DB. So a single DB with multiple tables
would be better but I don't want to break Moodle by adding a new unknown
table to its DB.

BTW last time I wrote an SQL query it ran against Oracle 8 (AKA years
ago) so let me know if my use of "DB" and "Table" is unclear or not
relevant for PostGres.

Thanks,

Greg S

-----Original Message-----
From: Martin Langhoff [mailto:martin.langhoff at gmail.com] 
Sent: Monday, June 02, 2008 4:35 PM
To: Greg Smith (gregmsmi)
Cc: server-devel at lists.laptop.org
Subject: Re: Edublog notes (was: Re: The road towards xs-0.3 - update)

On Tue, Jun 3, 2008 at 2:36 AM, Greg Smith (gregmsmi)
<gregmsmi at cisco.com> wrote:
> Thanks a lot for the review. I copied your reply to the Uruguay 
> edublog volunteer list: uruguay-XO-coordination at googlegroups.com

No prob. But make sure to bring them to subscribe to server-devel at .
Let's have the blogs-on-XS conversations here -- most of the tech issues
are common across XS projects ;-)

> A few preliminary questions.
> 1 - I'm not clear on what you are saying here: "DB - assume Postgres 
> 8.x series, support mySQL"
> Is it PostGres or MySQL? (btw we already brought up a box w/MySQL, so 
> hopefully it will be easy to copy tables and queries over).

The XS right now has Pg, and webapps that want a DB must use Pg. Now,
all the *good* blog systems out there support both Pg and mysql. Any
blog tool that lacks multi-db support, I would be suspicious of. So pick
one that supports both ;-)

The paragraph above has an implied recommendation: don't write your own.

> 2 - Should we have our own table in a single DB that is shared by 
> Moodle

You should be looking at using
 - Moodle's "official" blog facility --> if you need to add a table,
it'll have to be inside of moodle's DB
 - Moodle's "oublog"  --> same as above
 - An existing standalone blog tool --> the blog tool will have its own
DB, create any additional tables in there

> and all other apps or do need our own DB. I think the DB will be used 
> for storing who posted what blog where, pending blogs and all that kid

> of persistent data. Tarun may have other comments on what he needs in 
> the DB.

Just to make sure it's clear: avoid having to write your own blogging
software for the XS.

> 3 - We will bring up another XS and will put it on the internet.

You'll want an XS testbed - probably in a VM. But for the box that goes
on the internet, feel free to use any distro and setup you find useful.

> The HW and SW specs answer may be RTFM so don't hesitate to send a
link.

There is a "XS Server specifications" page on the wiki ;-)

cheers,



m
--
 martin.langhoff at gmail.com
 martin at laptop.org -- School Server Architect
 - ask interesting questions
 - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first
 - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff


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