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JourFixe-2014-07-21

The Jour Fixe takes place at Monday, July 21, 2014, from 11h00 - 17h00 at ILIAS open source eLearning e.V. in Cologne. Participants:

• Max Becker, Michael Jansen, Alexander Killing, Richard Klees, Matthias Kunkel (Minutes), Jörg Lützenkirchen, Stefan Meyer, Fabian Wolf

1 Appointments

2014-09-29: ILIAS Development Conference in Bozen
2014-09-30 - 10-01: 13th International ILIAS Conference in Bozen

2 Bugfixing for maintained versions 4.2, 4.3 and 4.4

Last releases:

• ILIAS 4.4.4 published at July 20, 2014
• ILIAS 4.3.8 published at July 14, 2014
• ILIAS 4.2.9 published at September 04, 2013

Next releases:

• 4.5.0_beta1 is scheduled for …
• 4.4.5 is scheduled for August, 2014
• 4.3.9 is scheduled for September, 2014
• 4.2.10 is scheduled for July 2014

We went through Mantis and had a overlook about all open issues reported or modified since the last Jour Fixe. All issues were screened and assigned to the responsible developers. We discussed in detail:

1. #13550: Maximum mail attachment size can be bypassed if split into several attachments : We are unsure how the initial desired behaviour was exactly. We prefer to calculate the sum over all attachements and not for each attachment file separately.
2. #13564: Link titles to initial overview of a blog or other starting page of objects: We support the idea to make this a "real" blue link in the case of blogs and portfolios.

3 Feature Requests for ILIAS 4.5

3.1 ILIAS 4.5 Statistics, Release Dates

According to the presentation at the last Development Conference we want to improve the documentation of the development process. The data of the following overview of development activities for the next upcoming major release is taken from the page Release 5.0. All developers are requested to update the status of their features.

Feature Status	Number of Features
A: Fully implemented and bugfixed features with final acceptance by Jour Fixe	0
B: Features currently in testing and bugfixing phase	8
C: Already implemented but need testing	16
D: Features currently in development	12
E: Development not started yet but contract settled	20
F: Scheduled for 4.5 and funding but no contract yet	48
G: Scheduled for 4.5 but only parly funded yet	13
H: Scheduled for 4.5 but no funding yet	73

Proposed Beta Release Date

• We propose to schedule a first beta release ILIAS 4.5.0 for September 15th 2014. Beta means, that all new features should be finished and tested by the developer. External testing of official testers must not be finished at this date. If any developer foresees that her or his already contracted developments may not be finished up to this date, please get in contact with the core team before the upcoming Jour Fixe.

3.2 ILIAS 4.5 Development Issues

1. Taxonomies for Test Questions - Topic 1.2.3, Discussion 4.2 : Matthias Kunkel and Björn Heyser should provide a screenshot of a test result screen /mode that supports taxonomies and illustrates how they are used and a screenshot of a test result screen / mode that lacks this support. How should the result screen be changed? We postpone the discussion to a JF where Matthias and Björn participate.
2. Selecting recipients for group and course mails: Matthias will add an additional mockup for the "mail to members" workflow, major goal: add the possibility to list the members of the course/group. If the necessary code changes are small we would accept the change as a usability for 4.5. Please re-schedule to an upcoming JF after adding the screenshots.
3. Mail from Course Members Gallery: This would be a feature request. Please add it to the discussion for 4.6.
4. Cloze question: Points on gap combinations: It is that the author needs to explicitly specify a "best" solution and to derive the "max. points" from this best solution. If a learner enters "an even better solution" (s)he will not get more points than the specified max. points.
5. UI Framework: We ask all developers to have a look at the prototype and evaluate possible impacts on their components. We should try to get an idea how much effort is needed to make a first step and move the core elements to the bootstrap CSS classes. In a first step not all screens would need to be fully responsive.
   • For component maintainers we forsee these main issues (more will definitly be added)
     • All buttons in custom templates need new css classes
     • All form InputGUIs need to be migrated
     • ...
   • Please check these issues in your components:
     • Is there any functionality broken?
     • How many templates do you use that e.g. contain buttons or other elements that are not rendered by a standard UI element.
     • How many special InputGUIs implementations need to be migrated in our component?

3.3 Feature Requests for 4.5

The following list contains features that have been added to the Feature Wiki before feature freeze and are supported by the responsible component maintainer, see also Feature Requests 5.0. Please do not add new features on this list.

1. Course Management: Series of Courses: We appreciate the general idea. However we do not have the resources to finish a concetual discussion for ILIAS 4.5, so we postpone this topic to 4.6. We ask every maintainer related to the feature to read the paper and we will continue the discussion. We may schedule a workshop for the topic in the near future as well.
2. Survey: Print and email own answers: We appreciate the feature and schedule it for 4.5.
3. Support commenting of questions in question pool: We appreciate the feature and schedule it for 4.5.
4. Exercise: Personalised Peer Feedback: We appreciate the feature and schedule it for 4.5.
5. Core / General: Use minify to combine javascript and css: We postpone this topic to an upcoming release. We don't have enough funding/resources to finalize this concept for 4.5.
6. File Handling: Filename Encoding: We postpone this topic to an upcoming release. We don't have enough funding/resources to finalize this concept for 4.5.
7. Administration: Default object settings: We postpone this topic to an upcoming release. We don't have enough funding/resources to finalize this concept for 4.5.
8. Logging: Log-Level - No maintainer yet : We postpone this topic to an upcoming release. We don't have enough funding/resources to finalize this concept for 4.5.

3.4 Postponed

The following features requests have been postponed to the next Jour Fixe due to missing time.

1. Logging: Object History - No maintainer yet
2. Test: Excel-Export: disable setting shuffle questions
3. Test: Item export: Include hints and media objects
4. Test: PDF-Export for the several participants
5. Notification System: (Advisory Council) General Notification System
6. Notification System: (Advisory Council) General revision and unification of the notification system(s)
7. SOAP / Webservices: SOAP Method: getLearningProgressOfAssignedCourses

4 Feature Requests for ILIAS 4.6

We set the following question types on the "abandonded feature list" for ILIAS 4.6.

1. Flash Question Type
2. Java Applet Question Type

If there is a strong need for your institution to support this question type, please send any example implementations to bheyser (at) databay.de. We will make a final decision during the 4.6 development in  2015.

Decission postponed

The following features requests have been postponed to an upcoming Jour Fixe due to missing time.

1. function to report a post to the moderator
2. Option to deactivate the file upload possibility
3. Notification to the author or administrator if a new comment was posted
4. Option to disable/hide the Export Profile-Button
5. Enforce Public Profiles + Option to force the global publishing of the personal profile (duplicate)
6. configurable Autostart for Videos
7. Letter Avatars
8. Password Recovery by using secret question
9. MS SQL Support
10. SMTP-Settings-Page
11. WAC: Enable Web-Access-Checker by default
12. Time-based activation of sections
13. Update questions from pools to tests
14. Search in blog
15. Editing a blog post by a non-author
16. Password protection for SCORM Modules

5 Miscellaneous

• Testing: We had a look at the new Testrail installation for ILIAS at testrail.ilias.de. A project for ILIAS core has already been created as well as first test suites for selected components.
  • The general structure of each test case consists of "Preconditions", "Steps" and "Exptected Result".
  • Testrail can push bug reports into Mantis if the Testrail user has added his/her Mantis account into the personal settings and if the test suite is named like the relative category in Mantis.
  • We prefer Testrail as the current technical solution for supporting the testing process. It will be used for creating test cases and and testing the test&assessment object for 4.5. But Testrail can also be used for test case creation and testing of all other components.
  • Because all existing test cases of the Excel sheets are in German as well as the Online Help which will be used as a content base for creating new test cases, we decided to use German as test case language.
  • More information about using Testrail has been published in the wiki of the Test Case Management Group. All component testers can get an account for Testrail from Matthias Kunkel.
• Performance: We support the idea of Support for HipHop Virtual Machine (HHVM) and would like to integrate the existing fixes into the trunk. All maintainers paricipating in the JF agreed to support the migration of the fixes.
  • Colin, could you please provide the changes in an SVN branch? This will make it easier to track changes and merge them into the trunk.
  • Max asked for a vagrant reference machine. He would like to support this, to make it possible to run HHVM on windows machines.
  • Max volunteers to setup a jenkins inspection for common heuristics related to HHVM.
  • We will move the 4.5 test environment to HHVM
  • Developer should downgrade bugfixes (e.g. non static called as static) to 4.4 if possible.

• Next Jour Fixe: Monday, August 04, 2014, from 12h30 until 17h30 at the office of ILIAS-Verein in Cologne.