Right now I'm rethinking my approach to the use of Learning Management Systems (LMS). There has been much recent debate between those in the pro- and anti-LMS camps.
On a recent trip, I decided to see if it was possible to do some Drupal development using an iPad. Now it's obviously easy to administer your Drupal site through the iPad's native Safari web browser but if you want to do some serious development, you'll need to be able to access your web server in order to use Drush and probably your GIT versioning system.
Brighton Digital Festival has timed it just right for the lovely weather we're having at last in Brighton!
This is a great opportunity to see the diversity of the town's digital media creativity brought together under one banner. As usual, I'll be heading down to the Mini Maker Faire at the Corn Exchange - free and fun and great if your kids share your curious passion for this sort of mashup.
I learnt a lot at the recent Drupal & Education Camp and thought I'd share a few highlights here. Professor David Upton of the Saïd Business School delivered an excellent keynote. There's many years' experience here in analysing big project roll-outs - and what David had to say about the challenges of sensible, incremental software building (for success) against the backdrop of organisational pressures to deliver extravagant, big-bang roll-outs (which usually fail) was insightful as well as entertaining. Catch up on David's talk here.
I am really looking forward to attending the upcoming Drupal & Education Camp at Oxford next month. Drupal has a long-standing relationship with the education sector, especially in the US where it powers about 26% of all .edu sites. I've written before about Drupal LMS initiatives and similar Drupal distributions targeted specifically at schools and universities.
Brighton's first DrupalCamp took place 28-29 April and was a fantastic success for all those involved. The weekend gave delegates a great opportunity to meet and learn from peers. The wide range of sessions held something for everyone and I particularly enjoyed Richard Jones' talk on Commerce, Jonathan Brown's talk on Storage API (a revelation!), Kevin Elliot's clear and sensible talk on SEO, and Guy Schneerson's sage session on best practice when approaching Drupal projects.
Roll-up, roll-up for Brighton's very own DrupalCamp on 28-29 April. This is a fantastic opportunity to learn more about how Drupal can help you - developers will get a chance to meet and learn from some of the best Drupal devs. Sereno is proud to be a sponsor of this event.
Find out more and register for free at the Brighton Area Drupal Association.
We're working on some fairly big projects at the moment, a number of which are still at the design stage. We have a pretty solid approach to design here at Sereno but as new methodologies and tools emerge, it's important to continually question your process and make improvements. For example, while we have used a five stage project delivery approach for over ten years, the details of the phasing has changed a lot. Our phases are pretty self-explanatory and hold true for Drupal and non-Drupal projects: Discovery, Planning, Development, Quality Assurance, Maintenance.
Setting up your xdebug debugger to work on the IDE Netbeans can be somewhat fiddly. I hope these steps will help you out. They are for an Ubuntu desktop, but should be helpful whatever OS you're using.
(a) Install xdebug. For me, this just meant running:-
sudo apt-get install php5-xdebug
(b) Make sure that the xdebug.so file is set up in your php.ini file. To do this, first find the .so file:
Run the 'find' command to locate it:-
find / -name 'xdebug.so' 2> /dev/null
I am seeing more and more debate about learning in the cloud. I am not sure everyone really understands the cloud concept, and it's often used interchangably with Software as a Service (SaaS) or managed services. Which is fine really in this context. In essence, people really mean the same thing - learning content managed remotely and easily delivered anywhere. In many organisations, outsourced learning management is gaining traction, as L&D departments struggle to implement LMS solutions that really work for them.
