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JourFixe-2010-09-06

Monday, 06 September 2010
09h00 - 13h40
at ILIAS open source office, University of Cologne

Jour Fixe Participants:

• Alexander Killing, Matthias Kunkel (Minutes), Stefan Meyer

AGENDA

1. Appointments
2. Bugfixing for maintained versions 3.10 and 4.0
3. Preparing ILIAS 4.1.0 stable
4. Feature wiki: plans for future versions
5. How to become an ILIAS developer
6. Development Conference Dortmund
7. Miscellaneous

1 Appointments

2010-09-20: Jour Fixe
2010-09-22: DevConf Dortmund
2010-09-23 - 24: ILIAS Conference Dortmund
2010-10-04: ILIAS Nord, HSU Hamburg

2 Bugfixing for maintained versions 3.10 and 4.0

Last bugfix releases have been published at

• ILIAS 4.0.9 at 18 July 2010
• ILIAS 3.10.13 at 22 February 2009
• ILIAS 3.9.11 at 02 February 2010

We went through Mantis and had a overlook about all open issues. All issues were screened and assigned to the responsible developers. We dealed the following issues in greater detail:

• #4942: Questions of completed LO presented in second test run : Since 4.0 the learning objectives view is no longer suppressing questions of reached learning objectives in the final test. This is related to changes in the test presentation. Therefore, an important aspect of this learning objectives view is lost. Due to missing financial support and maintenance problems we have to think about abandon this feature or revise it. Alexander created a feature wiki page for a Revision of Course Learning Objectives View and asks for comments and ideas.
• #6242: Session Recurrences - First Appointment: We will implement it as Google and iCal do. In this case we must "jump" to the first created appointment afterwards to give the user a feedback. E.g. screen should not stay on a Monday if appointments are created weekly on Thursday.

Next releases:

• 4.0.10 is scheduled
• 3.10.14 will be published on demand

3 Preparing ILIAS 4.1.0 stable

• ILIAS 4.1.0 RC2 has been published at 27 August 2010: 4.1.0 RC1
• All features are described in the feature list of 4.1.
• The next release candidate ILIAS 4.1.0 RC3 is scheduled for Monday, September 06.
• A first stable release of ILIAS 4.1.0 is scheduled for September 10.

Besides checking open bug reports we discussed:

• Mantis 6348 : Entry point to Administration: Is not considered as high priority but usability problem and will be fixed by Alex after major bug fixes.
• Tabs Guideline - Renaming "List Files" in "Content": Jour Fixe agrees to rename the tabs into "Content".
• Workflow for new Plugin Slots? (see forum): The problem is that such a slot would be very specific. We would need to discuss a more general slot specification first. Leifos and Databay currently create patches in these situations (see all the different branches in SVN).

4 Feature wiki: plans for future versions

We discussed the following suggestions that were set on today's agenda:

• Explorer Tree Guideline for starting points when opening explorer trees: The guideline is highly appreciated.
• Structure Import: ILIAS 4.1 includes the possibility to export/import repository structures in courses. This is still missing on the category level. If the Excel Macro could create export files following this structure, we would not need an additional import procedure. The user related actions (role assignment) could be done separately with the user import.
• Migration of value field in table settings: We highly appreciate the feature. We must limit this to a number of fields, since the type affects the code. Which fields should be tackled. Currently we only see this for the value field in the settings table.
• Self-Evaluation - Diagnostic-Tool: Hansjörg Lauener clarified his concept of a self evaluation feature in ILIAS. It is now considered to be a kind of survey mode (or extension). We would highly appreciate to discuss this idea at the next DevConf in Dortmund.
• Wiki Navigation: We will implement the new navigation layout and continue the discussion on this during ELBA2 implementation. We currently have no general idea, how to solve the "last visited page" issue. But we should start with a list of all screens that "leave" the context and are confusing.
• Page Content: The problem in the screenshot shows, that it is necessary to make it possible to activate/deactivate this feature. If the headings are not in a correct order it may result in a "useless" numbering.
• Redesign for comments, annotations and tags: JF 6 Sep 2010: We currently refuse the whole proposal. Reasons:
  • It breaks with the way the actions menu currently is used: Mainly for repository related functionalities and for navigation into different parts of the object (viewing/editing).
  • It adds more clutter to the repository (bad usability, we are happy that we got rid of clutter with 4.0)
  • It makes the actions menu more complex (bad usability)
  • It will definitely reduce performance in the repository (more information needs to be read from the database, slower performance also reduces usability)
  • Features cannot be offered "consistently", e.g. comments of subcomponents (like pages in learning modules/wikis) are not shown. Users may expect that. (may also have a negative influence on usability)
  • Embedding these features "into" the repository screen is very unusual and adds complexity (visbility of "Add new item" while editing comments).

The following features are in discussion to be abondonned in 4.2 due to missing funding, maintenance problems and conceptual issues. If you are using this feature and would like to keep in the future versions in ILIAS, please contact the ILIAS core team.

• Learning Objectives View in courses
• Feedback in courses
• Timings view in courses

5 How to become an ILIAS developer

We started to define the process on how to become a module and feature maintainer and getting SVN account for ILIAS. A draft ist published in the development guide.

6 Development Conference Dortmund

The following topics for the for the next development conference in Dortmund at September 22 are already confirmed:

• ePortfolio - concept and plans to implement ePortfolio functionality in ILIAS by Alexandra Tödt
• ELBA 2 - new features and improvements by Martin Studer

7 Miscellaneous

Next Jour Fixe:

• 20 September 2010, 9 a.m. at ILIAS-Verein office.