[Server-devel] plans for http://schoolserver

[Martin Langhoff]

On Sat, Feb 21, 2009 at 3:50 AM, Daniel Drake <dsd at laptop.org> wrote:
> What are the plans for the http://schoolserver front page?

Your browse homepage is great :-) the XS homepage is going to be
moodle. One that works I mean -- playing with it the last couple of
weeks I've found plenty of brokenness.

However, it will be served from /moodle - because

 - Hopefully we'll have other tools (some wikislice server, mediawiki,
mahara, etc) each in its dir, I don't want to nest or clobber
namespaces in the filesystem or in the url namespace.

 - Having the redirect from / to /moodle makes it trivial for local
teams to override my design and redirect elsewhere without
losing/breaking moodle.

also - I'm hoping to at some point get a long list of translations of
the word school so as to serve all those dns names. So if someone
writes 'escuela' in the url bar... we do the right thing.

> On the schoolserver, we want to host some extra activities (for kids
> own perusal), and content bundles for textbooks, and some slightly
> more distant ideas like internal school blogging and wikis etc. I
> guess we'll have to develop some kind of portal page at
> http://schoolserver

Moodle does most of what you describe, and it's getting better fast.

> Will moodle run at that address rather than /moodle? We would
> not want our work to be in conflict with future development paths for
> the XS.

My best suggestion is

 - play in depth with moodle, it does lots, and there's extra modules,
plugins and stuff...
 - if you build your own thing, *don't* put it in the root of the url
namespace - put it in /mything
 - override the / redirect

also, if you build your own thing, tell me about it. My hope is that
moodle is flexible enough do it all. Except run emacs perhaps.

> I am a little skeptical as the one moodle install that I did use (at
> my university) would be too complicated for young children, IMO.

My plan is to aggressively simplify moodle. I know it's not there yet,
so if you decide to do otherwise that's fine with me. I'll be curious
to see what people do, mainly to see where I can steer moodle towards.

And! Most Moodle installs are a shambles, and most Moodle-taught
courses are a disaster too. That also sometimes plays against people's
opinion of it :-(

cheers,


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