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

[Martin Langhoff]

On Wed, Jun 4, 2008 at 1:27 AM, Greg Smith (gregmsmi)
<gregmsmi at cisco.com> wrote:
> On the sanity check, that's not it :-(

Well, I think it is pretty close :-) What you described is roughly
what I had read a few weeks (months?) ago. So I described an
additional step - an xo activity to blog, that you are not planning to
do (great - so we can go even simpler).

Don't worry about mockups - at least not for me :-) You still have a
blog utility that you want to run on the XS. This blog utility needs
(in rough terms) to

 - understand a simple level of identity & roles (provided by XS
facilities, as we've discussed)
 - let users blog, tag, etc
 - let users mark entries as draft/public/etc
 - show user's blogs locally
 - allow teachers to approve somerthing for publication
 - push queued entries to a remote blog

If you are doing thetasks above, you need a ton of supporting code -
database management, input sanilitsation, formatting, search, per-user
view, per-blog view, per-tag view, combinations of those views, who's
part of this group blog, adding/removing members to a group blog, some
(perhaps simple) theming for each blog, and more, and then some more.

And once it's done, it's 90% of a blog.

Some of those things are important for users - users won't accept it
as a "complete" thing untiil it has them. Others are important for
sysadmins (I'm your meta-sysadmin here) and if I don't see a good
quality DB abstraction for portability, database schema upgrade
management, good scalable SQL, input validation, good quality
data-formatting on display... well, I can't say yes to it.


> We do not plan to code, host, share or serve any blogs! All we will
> build is a simple front end that let's users create a blog post and
> click once to have it appear on a Moodle Blog, Blogger.com, Drupal etc.
>
> Kids enter content, clicks post and that's it. The back end SW running
> on the XS takes that post and puts it on the blog e.g.
> http://centenarioescuela38sg.blogspot.com/

Hmmmm. There are 2 possible scenarios I can imagine...

1 - the school is super-connected to the internet, and everybody
publishes _directly_. In that case, we don't need the software - let's
just use blogger.com

2 - the school has spotty or no connectivity, and perhaps you want to
run a "local" school blog, not visible for all the world to see.
_Some_ entries are tagged "public to the world" and those get pushed
to blogger.com/drupal/moodle

I _think_ we are talking about #2, in that case, your software is
really valuable and I agree with Wad - it will be great to have blogs
local to the school. Maybe there's internet, maybe there's not.

> Tarun and Marcel, let me know ASAP if the description above...

Tarun, Marcel, are you guys here on server-deve@? hop on! ;-)

cheers,



m
-- 
 martin.langhoff at gmail.com
 martin at laptop.org -- School Server Architect
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