Community portal tool
From FTA Wiki
Contents |
[edit] Tools comparision
[edit] Main vision
The community portal should be an inviting place for formal and informal learners, teaching and research staff and external specialists to share knowledge, participate in informal learning networks and contribute to the development of materials around the main topic of education and learning about free technologies. It should bring together both staff from partner organisations as well as learners enrolled in FTA courses and informal learners.
[edit] What do we need?
- easily view what's going on -> no need for login to see last news, events, etc.
- easy participation, after registration and login
- help build users a reputation, based on activities in the FTA campus, community portal and elsewhere -> ePortfolio
- interest groups to discuss (forums), share knowledge (file uploads and links) and development of new documents
- social network features, to invite and link to friends, syndicate external rss feeds, blog
- dashboard signalling where the activity is going on
- possibilities to feed community activities to the FTA Drupal site as highlights (see mockup)
- possibilities to integrate the portal with Drupal and the FTA Campus: registrations and login takes place in Drupal
- secure communication
- needs to be based on FS and OS (of course!)
wishlist:
- photolog
- show identi.ca activity
- if possible include FTA Certificates in learner profile
- if possible by default open groups, but with the possibility to configure a group as "invitation only"
[edit] Mahara
- Strong points
- profile tools
- integration with Moodle out of the box (via Moodle Network)
- custom user views
- group creation with own forums
- Social network features (IMHO: this is very weak in Mahara --wouter 17:36, 9 December 2010 (UTC))
- RSS feature
- Weak points
- Non public access to forums and other spaces. Log in is mandatory.
- Since all is private, search engines don't index the content.
- Very limited configuration options of front page and customizations.
- It's not possible to add static pages
- Not possible to show global recent activity
- Customisation requires hardcoding system files. Upgrading would be a problem.
- Non strong community support
- There is no existing integration with Drupal
[edit] Mahara + Drupal links
- Solution? http://python.blogs.ilrt.org/2010/11/15/smoothing-a-mashup-of-moodle-mahara-and-drupal/
- http://groups.drupal.org/node/24355
[edit] Elgg
Summary Complete Elgg Features. Test environment at the FTA Beta server: https://beta.ftacademy.org/elgg/ You can join testing here. And we enabled a discussion forum in the FTA Campus Support.
- Strong points
- allows real public groups, no login required
- Drupal integration, needs more research
- Mailman integration
- Elgg has a large community of users
- RSS and FOAF for content syndication
- OpenID and LDAP for user authentication
- Check the API for more integration
- Plugin for support with Moodle Networks: "It only supports SSO to Moodle for now (with automatic user creation if Moodle is configured to do so) due to the peer details having a hardcoded xmlrpc server url." Test out this demo site.
- Moodle MNet Library: is this useful?
- Weak points
- There is no existing integration with Drupal ("The granular activity stream API ensures your plugins can push the required content to your users.")