Code structure

[Skylar Saveland]

(Being new to pinax development and only a year into Django - a quick
question)

Are we going to push and pull a clone of a pinax clone_project as the
trunk of pinax-lms or branch the entire pinax project itself? From
what I gather in this name:

http://github.com/pinax/pinax-lms-demo/tree/master

We are making a demo site and not really pushing all of pinax in this
repo. So, to start the version control we might have:

$ pinax-admin clone_project social_project lms
$ rm $this_and_that_we_don't_need
... rm ... rm ... change settings? Maybe we just keep all of
social_project?
// btw, which project is the envisioned starting point?

$ cd lms
$ git init
$ git add .
$ git commit -m "This is the basis for what we will push and pull"

So we will just be versioning a single instance of pinax and see what
might filter back into pinax proper?

And, someone should be able to clone this into a (pinax-env) and be
able to syncdb and runserver immediately?

[James Tauber]

Demo development will work like

http://github.com/jtauber/code.pinaxlms.com/tree/master

does. You:

1. either:
a. git clone git://github.com/pinax/pinax-lms-demo.git
or
b. fork it and clone your own repo
2. set up a virtualenv of, say, pinax-0.7b2 somewhere else
3. active your virtualenv
4. run syncdb and runserver within the demo project

There's no git init or pinax clone_project involved and you never
clone or fork Pinax itself.

Any prototype apps we build will be under the apps directory of the
demo project at first. They can be moved in to Pinax proper later.

This is the approach I took with code.pinaxproject.com and it's worked
very well.

James

[James Tauber]

Let me put something up at pinax/pinax-lms-demo on github so you
actually have something to try with :-)

James

[James Tauber]

In doing the start of the LMS demo project, I immediately hit a quick
design discussion we need.

Pinax supports multiple modes of signup / account creation from anyone
being able to signup to admins having to create all accounts.

For the purposes of the LMS *demo* should we just support open signup?

I'm only talking about for the initial demo / prototype.

James

[Rob Yates]

Every use case I have come up with for the LMS system that I want to
deploy includes open registration for the world in an effort to build
community around the course topic and in essence providing viral
marketing for the course. Users that are attending a course would then
get different privileges to "protected content".

The issue with this approach is behind-the-firewall enterprise LMS
implementations where they want to pre-populate user records with data
from the HRIS system, but this isn't likely a common use case for early
versions of Pinax LMS.

-Rob

[Skylar Saveland]

> Pinax supports multiple modes of signup / account creation from anyone
> being able to signup to admins having to create all accounts.
> For the purposes of the LMS *demo* should we just support open signup?

I think so; being able to do a bare signup with a fresh session and get access to some functionality would be nice.  Then maybe teachers can be invited by administrators and students can be invited by administrators or teachers.

Certainly protected content and managing permissions to it will be key for most of the use cases I can think of:
college, corporate, k-12

But, allowing some content even to anonymous users is okay with me even in the final iteration.  As long as there are classes/lessons/quizzes/administration/content_management_forms that can be viewed only with permission.

In a University setting, of course, no one who is not affiliated with the University can just add content.  They might be able to view some... but never at any point can a stranger waltz in and start uploading pictures and starting courses.  That would be an interesting twist on social networking if it was "course" oriented....
 

> I'm only talking about for the initial demo / prototype.
> James

I actually think that some of the final iterations and extra-pinaxical customizations could run the gamut from completely private to completely open.

[Skylar Saveland]

> For the purposes of the LMS *demo* should we just support open signup?

But, in short YES. We can go more granular later but as simple as
possible to start out.

[Skylar Saveland]

> There's no git init or pinax clone_project involved

I was just pretending to be you since there was no project to clone at
github yet ;).

> and you never  
> clone or fork Pinax itself.
>
> Any prototype apps we build will be under the apps directory of the  
> demo project at first. They can be moved in to Pinax proper later.

That's just what I was thinking.

[Bruce D'Arcus]

FWIW, at our institution, permissions tend to be handled using LDAP.
So a student or faculty does not enroll per se; its all transparent.
E.g. student enrolls for a course, faculty create a course site,
student is automatically enrolled.

Bruce