Posts Tagged ‘Xoops’

Progress on the forum

Monday, March 16th, 2009

Good news! I’ve found a decent discussion forum module for WikiStudent. It’s called Newbbex and here is the icon:

Newbbex

There was a newer discussion forum component available (X-Forum) for $30, so no thanks! (I don’t know when Xoops started introducing commercial software… One of the reasons I preferred it to Joomla was because everything was free. Not anymore. Shucks.)

I played around with this Xoops module and have organised the forum structure: At the top level you will have subject categories (E.g Afrikaans), then the forums (E.g. AFK101-Q, AFK102-R), then the forum topics (E.g. Problems with assignment 1).

If all goes well on the live server, WikiStudent will be using Newbbex. If not, I’ll have to either find something ancient but free (i.e. pre-2008), or new and $30.

Two things to note:

  1. I am going to require a wiki page for a Unisa module, before a corresponding discussion forum is created.
  2. Every forum will have to have at least two moderators – preferably students currently registered for the module.

Tags:
Posted in Discussion Forums | No Comments »

Finding a Xoops downloads module

Saturday, March 14th, 2009

I had a look at three modules (plugins) to use for the WikiStudent downloads page, and have installed two of them on my local PC, including WF-Downloads:

WF-Downloads

The third one (x-Torrent) looks great!

X-Torrents

It is the newest of the Xoops downloads modules, and features a PayPal secure interface (so that members can pay to access your downloads), but it costs $20 :-( If I were charging Unisa students for downloading notes then yes, I might pay the $20 for this software, which is slightly tempting… but I’ve always wanted to keep everything on WikiStudent free and am going to stick to my decision!

Tags:
Posted in Download Study Notes | No Comments »

Installing the new poll module

Tuesday, March 10th, 2009

Today I downloaded the latest Xoops poll module (called xoopspoll). It was released only 4 weeks ago and is thankfully compatible with my version of Xoops. This is the plugin that lets you create questions that people can vote on. It allows single or multiple select, various colours for the result graphs, and expiry dates.

xoopspoll

Because I’m re-doing WikiStudent with usability in mind, one of the important things I want to do everywhere is remove anything that isn’t absolutely necessary. The Xoops poll module has a large comment area under each question, which the old WikiStudent had, since it was activated by default. This time round I’m getting rid of this  comments box.

Why am I removing it? Because in the past, Unisa students happily voted on the polls (e.g. How many hours do you study per day?) but hardly anybody had anything to comment. Because it’s so much easier to just click an option than click and give an explanation why you chose what you did, I think we can do without comments on the polls.

Tags: ,
Posted in Polls | No Comments »

Xoops as the CMS for WikiStudent

Saturday, March 7th, 2009

Ok, you probably don’t know two of the words in the title of this post, so let me explain :-)

Xoops (pronounced “zoops”) is a CMS, or Content Management System, which is essentially a tool for creating a website quickly. Using a CMS, it is possible to get a professional-looking website up in half an hour, and then administer it by logging in to a back-end, rather than learning how to program!

XOOPS Project!

There are so many CMSs out there. I chose Xoops for WikiStudent not because I’d researched all the options and found it to be the best, but rather because I worked for a company that used it for their intranet (which had over 50 branches worldwide, so at least I know it’s scalable!). I also liked the look of the member profile pages, and the fact that you can come up with your own fine-grained permission-based system (not just ‘registered’, ‘admin’, and ‘anonymous’ users which is all that some CMSs offer). Xoops is also rated as one of the top 5 CMSs. It’s worked well for WikiStudent in the past and it makes sense to carry on using it (a newer version, of course) rather than try migrate to a different platform. (What a headache that would be!)

Tags:
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »