DrupalEd is now available for download! The full announcement is available here --

In distributing this version, we opted to distribute the site as a tarball with all relevant code and third-party libraries. Down the road, we'd like to figure out a way around this, but given that both TinyMCE and the audio module require LGPL'd libraries that can't be hosted on d.o, AND that many people in education are working through software issues without a great deal of tech support, we figured a tarball with all the necessary code would lower the barrier to entry sigificantly. However, we would like to move away from this in the medium-to-long term -- we'd love to hear some ideas on ways around this .

This version bundles some useful functionality, and it is by no means done -- the biggest short-term priority is to build out an install profile, but we'll be writing up some more comprehensive notes over the next week.

For those who want to get involved in the ongoing development and maintenance of the site, join the working group over on groups.drupal.org. Enjoy the site!

Cheers,

Bill

Comments

norritt’s picture

looking good! good package idea.

webchick’s picture

Here's a list of the modules included, for those who already know Drupal:

akismet
diff
freelinking
imce
jstools
link
login_destination
node_images
og
og_vocab
pathauto
recent_changes
tagadelic
tinymce
tokenauthdate
update_statusdaterange
userplus
viewfieldaudio
views_bonusbuddylist
views_fastsearchcalendar
viewsbio
wikitoolscck

Congratulations to bonobo and team... hope to see this distro continue to improve. :)

PS: Quiz module is ported for 5 now. ;)

bonobo’s picture

One of the things I'll be doing (probably early next week) is writing up the rationale behind the module choices (for ex, why bio instead of usernode?), and laying out some thoughts for next step -- thanks for starting us down that road!

Cheers,

Bill

-------
http://www.funnymonkey.com
Tools for Teachers

robertDouglass’s picture

My favorite profiles-as-nodes recipe to date: usernode and bio.

  1. rename usernode to Profile
  2. Make Profile nodes (formerly usernodes) the node type used by bio module
  3. delete bio node type

- Robert Douglass

-----
Lullabot | my Drupal book

bonobo’s picture

Part of the reason we opted for bio instead of usernode was for long term stability -- usernode gives more functionality (and there is the possibility of some version of it is heading toward core, maybe?) but also makes for a more complex setup. So, in this case, we went with less functionality in the interest of a config that wouldn't complicate an upgrade path in six months. Really, we wanted some element of user profiles to be searchable, exposed via taxonomy, and exposed to views, and bio got us that.

But I Iike the bio/usernode cocktail :) That seems to offer the best of all worlds -- I'll be trying that out soon!

Thanks,

Bill

-------
http://www.funnymonkey.com
Tools for Teachers

Michelle’s picture

Sorry to add more OT to the post, but this caught my attention. I'm currently using just usernode for my profiles and it works quite well. I read the description of bio and it sounds like it does the same thing as usernode. I'm wondering what the advantage of using usernode and bio together are? I'm planning on writing a tutorial on using usernode for profiles once my life settles down a bit (see http://groups.drupal.org/node/3724 ) and would like to know if there's a better method before I go and write this all up. :)

Thanks,

Michelle

--------------------------------------
My site: http://shellmultimedia.com

venkat-rk’s picture

Great to hear. In case anyone is interested, there's a demo here:
http://drupaled.alphabetademo.org/

----
Previously user Ramdak.

bonobo’s picture

Hello, venkat-rk,

The demo is a slightly earlier version, but it will help people get a feel for the improved site.

The demo doesn't have the social networking features of the release version, and there are a raft of improvements in the UI of the released version.

Over the next few days, we'll probably update the demo site to reflect the most recent config options.

Cheers,

Bill

-------
http://www.funnymonkey.com
Tools for Teachers

newms’s picture

Hey, what module are you using for the image gallery in your demo? http://drupaled.alphabetademo.org/?q=node/166/image_gallery

Also how does DrupalEd compare with moodle?

newms

bonobo’s picture

RE the image gallery: the node_images module

RE how does DrupalEd compare with Moodle -- a longer answer is really required here, and it's something I'll probably write up over the next few weeks, but here's a short answer: Moodle is built to manage courses, and that is what it does best -- in Moodle, you are always working in (or in relation to) a course. In DrupalEd, you can be working in a course, or on your own. or in an informal group. The site is designed to allow for greater degree of flexibility for both users and organizations -- really, the DrupalEd site can function as a stand alone course management system, or as an internal intranet, or as a hybrid of both. The key in tweaking this functionality involves the Organic Groups config, and balancing access to content types against roles.

Cheers,

Bill

-------
http://www.funnymonkey.com
Tools for Teachers

yoroy’s picture

I mean, you might want to add a "what is drupalED"-bit to your post.
Ah, it says so in the full announcement, but still. Just a friendly suggestion.

Cross_and_Flame’s picture

This is a drupal 5.1 install?

bonobo’s picture

yes

-------
http://www.funnymonkey.com
Tools for Teachers

mstef’s picture

Hahah where was this 3 months ago, before I made --> http://www.tweako.com ???

I'll check it out.

goose2000’s picture

I looked at this module list and I don't see how I could do a quiz or
other assessment? Why not have the quiz module included?

To me it is a little off saying ' here's DrupalEd' but there is no
assessment tools, scoring, etc.,

But I'm excited for this effort in any case. Thank You.

John A

bonobo’s picture

As we aren't using panels, sparkline, pagearray, etc in the site, we didn't include them in the tarball -- most of these dependencies are from the views_bonus pack -- by excluding them from the tarball, we were able to have a (slightly) smaller download, and it also means a few less modules to track over time.

Thanks for the feedback, and thanks for checking it out --

btw, in the 24 hours since we put the post up, the tarball has been downloaded nearly 700 times!

-------
http://www.funnymonkey.com
Tools for Teachers

dcine’s picture

Can someone help me? I try to translate to spanish drupaled and i can't, one error tells me that i don't have a tmp folder or something like this. I try to change the settings to the settings of the standard drupal an now when try to upload the traslation (es.po) nothing happens. ¿There are someone that can help me? (please)
(I have a drupal instalation in the same server in spanish and all the traslations are ok and i can upload the po files)

Barry Collins
Blog: http://www.los5000dedosdeldoctort.com - Web: http://www.dcine.org

bonobo’s picture

*Disclaimer* I don't know much about internationalization and/or translation *end disclaimer*

First, make sure the core "Locale" module is enabled.

Second, for this procedure, create a folder named "tmp" and make sure it can be written to by Drupal -- for this procedure, set the rights to 777 (assuming you are using a Linux server?)

However, you can get a more informed opinion in any one of these places --

The Translations group: http://groups.drupal.org/translations
The Translators guide handbook page: http://drupal.org/node/11130
The Internalization group: http://groups.drupal.org/i18n
The Translations forum (probably the best bet to start): http://drupal.org/forum/30
The Internationalization handbook page: http://drupal.org/node/133977
The internationalization page points you to the internationalization module: http://drupal.org/project/i18n

When you post your question in the forums, be sure to include the operating system of your server, your PHP version, and your MySQL version. The Drupal code used in DrupalEd is all 5.1, and all the modules are the latest stable versions (or clean dev versions).

I hope this helps, and thanks for translating this into Spanish! When you are done, will you write up how you did it so others can do it as well?

Cheers,

Bill

-------
http://www.funnymonkey.com
Tools for Teachers

silverado’s picture

Hi, I'm in the process of restoring all the tables by importing oa_drupaled.sql. But when I execute the script I get the following error:

#1064 - You have an error in your SQL syntax near 'ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 AUTO_INCREMENT=1 ' at line 7

Anybody can help me?

Thanks

bonobo’s picture

It sounds like you are running MySQL 4.0.x or older

For the record, we only tested on MySQL 4.1 and greater --

You can eliminate the error by changing ENGINE=MyISAM to TYPE=MyISAM -- Off the top of my head, I also don't think that MySQL 4.0 supports the CHARSET collations, so you might need to delete that as well --

It is also possible that some of the modules used in the site require 4.1 or greater.

This probably isn't the answer that you want to hear, but MySQL recommends upgrading from 4.0.x to 5.0 or 5.1 -- there is no longer active development on 4.0 (or 4.1, for that matter) -- in the interest of rolling out a site that as many people as possible could use, we tested on MySQL 4.1, but we did not test on MySQL 4.0.

Cheers,

Bill

-------
http://www.funnymonkey.com
Tools for Teachers

silverado’s picture

You're right bonobo. My server has an old Mysql version. I'm planning moving to another company and I'll test it there.

Thanks!!!

veeaa’s picture

Thank you so much Bill for DrupalEd! I will test DrupalEd next summer. Right now I use 4.7.3. I am teaching computing at college level for 16-19 years old boys, mainly.

I have never understood the fuss about distance learning. 99% of all teaching happens in classrooms worldwide, and will. At least I teach and meet my students almost daily in the classroom, and I teach only in the computer class. So, I and we need computers and the internet to support classroom learning. How or where?

1. I want to have all my teaching material to be available on the net, not on paper or on a server behind a firewall. On the other hand, the material should be able to be published easily, but on the other hand, I want to restrict the availability to a certain group or even individual. This requires an advanced, but easy to use Content Management System, CMS. Content management is everything.

2. I want also to govern my teaching on the net and share all the information, but private should be private, of course. This means: having the absence records, diary (what we did during lessons), grades/scores (what assignments done/undone) and such data on the net. I would like to interact with the parents also. So, I want to communicate. This requires an advanced user database with versatile user rights, including access control for certain menu items/folders/pages.

3. For me, the most important thing is to distribute stuff/info to students on the net, my students are not very eager to contact me or even each other, for example forums and blogs do not work. And, since we meet in the classroom, we do not have the need to communicate in writing. I do not like to give "electronic assignments", since the copy/paste is so easy. That is why we use pencil and paper in the exams, for example. I would like to see my students taking notes also during lessons, but for "some reason", I have to teach more or less by learning by doing. I give assignments on the net, but the fastest way of checking and grading them is to read the printouts and write my comments with a pencil. Much faster than typing with two fingers.

For item 1, Drupal is great, especially with the category module. For images, though, Drupal is lousy (Imce etc. do not work). I use MSWord for writing my lessons (20 to 30 pages in paper sheets), I insert pictures also (use SnagIt for capturing), save as filtered HTML, use HTMLTidy, change the image path, copy/paste the HTML into TinyMCE and upload the images with FTP. For me, category module is a must, although it ruins the taxonomy(?) I have hundreds/thousand of pages (measured in paper sheets) and pictures, too, on my Drupal based system.

For item 1, Moodle is bad. You create a course, add your pages (probably I could not use the same Word/FTP system as desribed earlier). If you want to reuse your material for another course, you have to remove all users from the previous course, then add new ones, or something like that, very tedious and unnecessary work.

For item 2 Drupal lacks the absence module and folders/menus/nodes do not have permission system. Organic groups module is a saviour. Still, Drupal is much better than Moodle. For Moodle, problem is that it has to handle several groups, teachers, and even schools. But Moodle's user data base is one global one! One cannot divide students into hierarchical individual schools and/or groups, only one administrator! Unbelievable.

For item 3, regarding assignments, and private pages, I hope DrupalEd gives us new tools. Regarding creating and handling assignments, Moodle is better, but how many of you really create quizzes, multiple question forms, etc.? Again, paper and a pen is easier. Moodle is based on social learning, but sorry boys, my students, my boys, are not social!

I wish Drupal had the absent record keeping module and a proper user access control for menus, folders and nodes. A grade/mark module would be nice, but many schools have another stand alone system for them already.

nisguy’s picture

I'd take another look at Moodle, because some of what you said is false. I could explain, but this isn't Moodle forums.

no_idea_yet’s picture

Hi vm

Not sure when you looked at Moodle last but you might want to look again.

Other than the sharing of resources across courses, which is a major pain in the proverbial which will be fixed soon I hope, I would say the information you provide is wrong and has been since I started using Moodle (about 2.5 years ago).

The fact is both scripts are excellent tools for a given requirement and both tend to have users that want to add more to come up with a killer app in the LMS/CMS field e.g. there are a couple of attempts within the Moodle community to create a module to enable a more CMS look/functionality (which Drupal kills Moodle at) and obviously DrupalEd is trying to get an elearning/lms structure sorted out (IMHO, Moodle kills Drupal at that).

Bottom line is finding a tool that meets your requirements and I for one would love to have a working integration of both scripts!

Regards
H

bonobo’s picture

The goal/point of DrupalEd is *not* to replace Moodle -- Moodle is a great app, with a deservedly loyal user base. More importantly, for many people, Moodle is precisely what they want. FWIW, I have taught using both Moodle and Drupal, and we support clients on both platforms.

I see Moodle and Drupal as complementary apps, and the choice about which app to use is predicated as much on philosophical approach to learning/the context within which learning is taking place as functionality.

RE integration: absolutely. The trick is defining the necessary points of integration. Sharing users is pretty straightforward; sharing content or course information requires more thought, and some new code.

Cheers,

Bill

-------
http://www.funnymonkey.com
Tools for Teachers

veeaa’s picture

Sorry, I gave wrong information about both Moodle and Drupal. Moodle has better user database than I described, and with Drupal we can give rights to individual nodes (that is why organic groups module is so great).

Actually, my problem is not Moodle or Drupal, it is the missing content (in my mother language), which makes me so frustrated. Perhaps the best e-learning environment ever, so far, is the CCNA exam by Cisco (or the Networking Academy by Cisco). Do they use an e-learning environment of their own, or is it commercial?

oskar_calvo’s picture

Hello, i'm a basque drupaler, and i'm trying to work with d-ed, but it gives me a lot of php error.

I'm with xp, easyphp 1,8, php 5.

¿Where can i report the bugs?

thanks

Oskar Calvo.

gestión del conocimiento y de la información con software libre

bonobo’s picture

Hello, Oscar,

For now, we are going to centralize discussion on http://groups.drupal.org/drupaled-distro --

As I said in the announcement, we have not tested with xp, or with easyphp 1.8, and cannot vouch for how the system will run in this environment. We also have not tested *at all* in IIS --

Our focus is in getting the best possible functionality on a LAMP stack -- we would gladly work with people within the community to help sort out those issues, but, given the scarcity of hours in the day, we will need someone else to take the lead on Windows/IIS support.

Cheers,

Bill

-------
http://www.funnymonkey.com
Tools for Teachers

emasters’s picture

I did a clean install of DrupalEd and all I get is a blank page. I got through the initial install, gave my database information, saw the base Drupal site. I then dropped the database tables and loaded the SQL file included with the distro. That completed without any errors. Now the site only serves up blank pages. I am running PHP 5.2.0, MySQL 5.0.27, and Apache 2.0.49 on SUSE Linux. The site runs on one of my servers, so there are no hosting issues. The URL for the site is http://labs.cali.org/drupaled/. There are no unusual messages in the Apache logs or the watchdog table of the Drupal database. I have several other Drupal 5 sites running on the same server including http://labs.cali.org/caliNGpal/ and they are running fine.
Any ideas?
Thanks,
Elmer Masters
http://www.cali.org/

bonobo’s picture

Hello, Elmer,

WRT PHP, MySQL, and Apache, you described our dev environment -- we were running a different flavor linux, but that shouldn't affect much.

I'd take a look at the basics: did all the files get uploaded, and into the correct locations? Did all the tables get restored? Try creating a database table manually, restoring the DrupalEd data there, and editing your settings.php to point there? How are permissions set on the DrupalEd install?

From what you're describing, it could be one of a few things. In this order, I would:

1. Grab a clean copy of the tarball, and re-upload the code -- make sure all the modules are present in sites/all/modules (there is a list earlier in this thread)
2. Create a db manually, and assign a user rights to that db (as described in install.mysql.txt)
3. Edit your settings.php file manually to point to the db created in step 2; hardcode the base_url
4. Point your browser to the site -- you should be set.

Cheers,

Bill

-------
http://www.funnymonkey.com
Tools for Teachers

emasters’s picture

Bill,
Thanks for the response. I tried all of your suggestions and none worked. Of course I didn't let that slow me down. I was thinking that a module was killing the page load, so I went back to the bare DrupalEd Distro and instead of jumping the database and reloading, I created a user 1 and started activating modules based on a list of active modules from the system table. This worked fine until I hit the 45th module. At that point, no matter what the module I activated next, the site blanked. I upped the memory limit for PHP since blank pages at install can be caused by the script using too much memory. I stopped at 96 meg since that seemed like a lot of memory for PHP to use.
Anyway, I backed down to 44 modules and started looking through the logs for clues. On the status page I notices that the version of Drupal was reporting as 5.2-dev. Odd, I thought. But it did give me an idea. I got rid of the DrupalEd install in the web tree, put in a fresh Drupal 5.1 install, copied in the /sites/all/ and /misc/lib directories, dumped in the database and now it works.
So, if I where a betting man, I'd say I stumbled on some sort of memory leak in Druapl 5.2-dev that is triggered by the number of modules being loaded.

Now I'm going to take a deper look into DrupalEd and join the group.

Thanks,
Elmer.

bonobo’s picture

Hello, Elmer,

I did indeed build DrupalEd around the latest stable build (there was some small bugfix that, IIRC, seemed important :) ) --

What module did you activate when the page blanked? Was it simply the 45th every time, or was it a specific module? If we could isolate it down to a specific module, maybe we could eliminate the problem.

Thanks again --

Bill

-------
http://www.funnymonkey.com
Tools for Teachers

emasters’s picture

Bill,
I was certainly hoping that it was one particular module, but it seemed to be anything over 45 that did it. If I turned one off in the system table bringing the total down to 44 or less, it came right back.
OTH, putting your stuff into a straight 5.1 install is great. Everything appears to be working and this is a great distro. It's going to save me a couple of weeks of shifting through modules for a project I'm working on.
Thanks,
Elmer

FabriceV’s picture

Yes, I have the same problem but not systematically. Once I enter the http address of the admin user and log again, the problem disappeared... But reappear erratically later... (use easyphp last beta version).

bonobo’s picture

As I mentioned earlier, we *did not* test using easyphp, so we can't vouch for how well DrupalEd will run in this environment. It's possible that the default config of easyphp doesn't play well with this distribution. Prior to release, we ran through close to 50 test installs in different environments, about half of which I did myself, and I didn't see any issues like this.

If there are adjustments to the config of easyphp that are required, I'd like to see them documented.

RE blank pages, this could be attributable to running out of memory, or a host of other factors.

Info that could be useful: if there is a specific page load that blanks all the time; server OS, PHP version, MySQL version, hosting environment (shared host, test box, dedicated server, etc)

Cheers,

Bill

-------
http://www.funnymonkey.com
Tools for Teachers

ventureskills’s picture

My understanding is that Akismet licensing is very strict and prohibits use by commercial or any other group including educational establishments without paying a substantial fee. Given that this distro is aimed at groups who perhaps are unfamiliar with licensing rules it might be wise to not include this module to avoid accidental misuse

Venture Skills
IT & New Media company
Join us in Nottingham for All About Asking a 2 Day SEO Course

bonobo’s picture

That's part of the reason why I left Akismet off by default -- that, and the fact that, within many educational organizations the site will be set up as a walled garden where the threat of outside spammers is non-existent (ie, anon users can't comment/create content, etc).

Akismet is developed by the folks behind wordpress, so it's not like they are part of the Evil Corporate Empire (tm) :) Their ToS are pretty good compared to many I've seen, but they do charge real money for a real service -- http://akismet.com/buy/non-profit/

Over time, I'd love to see spam handled by a combination of the Bad Behavior module and/or the Spam module --

RE "it might be wise to not include this module to avoid accidental misuse" -- I also think this could be a case where some good docs would be helpful -- how would you document this? Would you consider drafting some language we could include in future versions of the release?

Cheers,

Bill

-------
http://www.funnymonkey.com
Tools for Teachers

zeke-1’s picture

That great for this project. Go forward mans!
anyway, one things I want to ask:
-Whats about your plan to update to the next vesion ?
-Can the user of drupaled can update it if any changging was done ?

Cheer ! and good luck

bonobo’s picture

Hello, zeke,

RE Upgrades: we'll be upgrading the core code with Drupal point releases (ie, 5.1 to 5.2), or when modules have a security release. When Drupal 6 is released, we'll need to wait a bit for contrib to catch up prior to upgrading the entire codebase.

RE the user updating on their own: this is very possible, and one of the possibilities we made sure to leave open with DrupalEd -- In many ways, this is ideal -- DrupalEd provides a starting point, and the user can upgrade on their own as needed.

Cheers,

Bill

-------
http://www.funnymonkey.com
Tools for Teachers

zeke-1’s picture

Why don't user the acidfree for manage images?
I can't use node_Images module in this DrupalED version.!

bonobo’s picture

Image handling (and file handling in general) is evolving in Drupal -- rather than use acidefree, we opted for a lighter-weight approach.

If, however, you want to use acidfree in your site, there isn't anything stopping you -- just disable node_images, and enable and configure acidfree -- we specifically designed this config to allow individuals to customize it beyond the base config that ships with the site.

Cheers,

Bill

-------
http://www.funnymonkey.com
Tools for Teachers

zeke-1’s picture

Thank for answer!

I can registrated with http://drupaled.alphabetademo.org/
there is'nt mail sending back ! so I have no user name and pass, my Drupaled I just intall is the same problem !?
Is it a setup problem or the code error.?

bonobo’s picture

The email is working fine at alphabetademo.org -- in all likelihood, the email is getting caught in your spam filter -- see this --

Cheers,

Bill

-------
http://www.funnymonkey.com
Tools for Teachers

zemliansky’s picture

First of all, a huge "Thank you!" to all involved in the creation of this distribution. I have installed everything successfully, but now I am encountering some strange behavior on log in. When I log in, I see the welcome message. Problem is, I want every student's blog posts to be promoted to the front page so that we have a "class blog." I entered "node" in the "default home page" category and posted a blog post (having promoted it to the front page). However, now when I log in, I get a "page not found" message. What am I doing wrong?

Thank you!

pz

bonobo’s picture

A couple questions:

1. When you click the "home" button, where does it take you?

2. What happens when you navigate to ?q=node

3. What happens when you disable the "Login Destination" module?

In any case, I'd recommend using a view to create a custom listing of nodes for your home page, and then setting the view url as your home page destination at ?q=admin/settings/site-information

Cheers,

Bill

-------
http://www.funnymonkey.com
Tools for Teachers

zemliansky’s picture

Bill,

in response to your questions:

1. hitting the home button takes me to the welcome message that came with the site, even though I'd posted as blog post and promoted it to the front page, and that is what I want to be displayed on the front page.

2. same as above

3. disabling the log in redirect module seems to take me to my account, with everything I have posted on the front page.

I have not yet tried the last option because I am not sure how to do that and am afraid to mess something up.

Thanks.

pz

bonobo’s picture

Possibly, "node" is aliased to the welcome message.

Cheers,

Bill

-------
http://www.funnymonkey.com
Tools for Teachers

Christefano-oldaccount’s picture

Slashdot has a new story about Real Open Source Applications for Education and members are quickly posting their responses. I posted a comment about DrupalEd and hope that Drupalistas can share their experiences, recommendations and/or opinions.

zeke-1’s picture

I install drupaled.

My problem is:

-2 my primary menu "http://www.domain.com/?q=groups " goto page not found.
-3 my primary menu "http://www.domain.com/?q=calendar " lost.
-4 when I try goto "http://www.domain.com/?q=calendar/assignment-list" , the page view error with the tab bar, the structure broken
....some more view page in that tab is the same error.

But my true problem is , when i come back to the zen-Trevor theme, the error is continuous happen... I don't known what should to do
Anybody can tell me ?
Thanks.

droople’s picture

Saves a lot of time and effort looking for modules

thank you

bonobo’s picture

Hello, Zeke,

On the basis of the info you have provided here, I'm not sure where to start --

Have you added any additional modules, or changed any of the default config settings? I'd start there, and, as best as possible, try and backtrack to a clean config --

Or, drop the tables in your existing database, and start from scratch.

Cheers,

Bill

-------
http://www.funnymonkey.com
Tools for Teachers