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Has anyone considered integrating Claroline with Mambo?  Probably a bridge or sumthin?

interesting e-learning solution, thanks for mentioning it as i havnt seen it before.

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I prefer it to moodle, I think.  Haven't done a lot of examining it, but the little I've seen, Claroline seems more solid, and complies to standard betters.  Not as well known as moodle though.

I hadn't seen this before either...taking a look now. For others who might be curious:

http://www.claroline.net/

Looks like a nice OS project alternative to Blackboard or WebCT, which I understand have become bloated and prohibitively expensive since I had used them some time back.


On the same token, these academic portals are fine for handling organizational or assessment affairs of academic environments, but one thing many, if not all of them are missing are collaborative curriculum development utilities that go a little further than "here's the course, here's the location, here's the syllabus."  There are a couple web services like TaskStream (http://www.taskstream.com) that have that capability to map lessons and assignments against standards and the like, but again, it's a proprietary solution, and $$$ keep that solution out of the hands of most American public school systems, at least.

pointri, I'm far from an expert on Claroline, just played with it once when a client mentionned they might perhaps want to eventually go in that direction (!?!).  But having been a WebCT user these past few months, I can tell you, I *much* prefer Claroline.  At least it works with FF...

As for collaborative curriculum dev...  Why don't you ask the guys at Claroline? They seem keen on developing the thing in the "right" direction, and if that's a feature missing from most of them, it would be a point of difference that I'm sure could apppeal

I'll certainly keep an eye on it.  Pretty exciting stuff.

I'd be interested in knowing just how Claroline compares with moodle. I've done a little playing around with moodle, and quite like it - but I haven't actually started implementing anything in a live environment yet, so I'm still open to other possibilities. I'm primarily looking for something that can be adapted to a "corporate training" kind of environment as we move some of our executive development consulting online. Ideally, whatever we use will be able to be integrated with Joomla and Community Builder.

So, do you know of anywhere that has some kind of detailed review/comparison of Claroline and moodle (and any other OS packages for education that may be out there)?

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Hello Folks,

I created Claroline and Dokeos and I have read your discussion and also noticed that you installed Dokeos on : http://elearning.wwhostware.com/index.php

Just discovering Joomla!, I am quite interested as we are precisely having big discussions in our Dev Team on CMS features and softwares and looking for a way to connect the two ideas (LMS and CMS) together in a way or another. So I will be happy to learn more about your projects on this topic.

Thomas De Praetere

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Thomas De Praetere
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Hello Thomas,

You created *both* Claroline and Dokeos?  I hadn't heard of Dokeos, but am interested in Claroline.

Please note that wwhostware.com is not an official joomla site, don't know who created that.

Please feel free to drop me a PM if you want to explore working closer from your LMS and our CMS

Yes, I created both Claroline and Dokeos. See http://www.claroline.net/credits.htm and http://www.dokeos.com/team.php. I created Claroline at UCL in 2000 and then found some difficulties with the university when starting the Dokeos company in 2004 and decided to fork so as to register the Dokeos Trade Mark and continue the project with what I consider a more professional approach. Now the 2 projects go on and remain very close but Dokeos progresses much faster in my opinion. See the Dokeos 1.6 roadmap : http://www.dokeos.com/wiki/index.php/Roadmap_1.6

If you write to me at thomas.depraetereATdokeos.com I will be happy to send you our Partnership Programme (is that what you mean by PM?). We collaborate with Mandriva Linux, Aerolearn and the University of Gent + some 10 other organisations (see :  http://www.dokeos.com/team.php) and believe that open source development strength comes mainly from the ability to work together, also with other software projects.

One important detail : Dokeos is modular and integrates easily in an object oriented philosophy. See for instance our Extensions programme : http://www.dokeos.com/extensions/index.php This might help integrate the 2 softwares together.

Yours,

Thomas

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A PM is a Personal Message. You can sent one if you click on the user name, at the bottom choose 'Send this member a personal message.'

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Take care

Ok. I did it that way thanks.

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CEO of Dokeos

Surfing through the web, I stumbled this evening on this thread initated by Nicolas. Of course, it is possible to integrate Claroline into Mambo. And it's even quite easy.

I'm working into the Claroline development team. Since Claroline 1.6, I have written a revamped authentication system which is able to connect on ANY external authentication source. By default, the Claroline package provides several external authentication drivers to various generic authentication system (LDAP, Database, CAS ) and some specific Content Management Systems like PhpNuke, PostNuke or Spip. Challenged by the fact that we do not provide Mambo driver yet, I've immediately installed Mambo on my local server. And fifty minutes later, the new mambo driver for Claroline was ready.

The driver file is attached to my post. Extract this file and copy it into the 'claroline/auth/extauth/drivers' directory and paste these two lines below in the 'claroline/inc/conf/auth.conf.php' file.

$extAuthSource['mambo']['login'  ] = $clarolineRepositorySys.'auth/extauth/drivers/mambo.inc.php';
$extAuthSource['mambo']['newUser'] = $clarolineRepositorySys.'auth/extauth/drivers/mambo.inc.php';

And it should work.

I'm going to commit the Claroline/Mambo driver in our Code repository (available in read mode from our site claroline.net).

For those who might be interested ...

Best regards,

Hugues

Merci Hugues!
I think this should make vavroom happy, n'est ce pas?
Haven't tested this, just one question looking at the code you posted: will this also work with "joomla" (by changing all occurences of "mambo" to "joomla"?
THanks again.

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Hugues, merci de ton travail, c''est très apprécié.  Ton driver adresse la question des usagers, mais pas nécéssairement la question d'intégration du système même.  Par example, si je veux présenter Claroline à l'intérieur de mon site Joomla! à moins d'utiliser un "wrapper" ou un "iFrame" (qui posent des problèmes), ca risque de ne pas fonctionner.  As-tu des idées pour régler ca?  Enfin, pas grave si non, je vais essayer le tout sur une copie locale, et voir comment ca marche

Thanks Hugues, I appreciate your work very much.  Your driver fixes the userbase, but does it address the system integration itself?  For example, if I want to load Claroline within my Joomla! site, unless I use a wrapper or an iFrame (which have inherent problems), I suspect it's not going to work.  Do you have any idea on a fix for that?  No worries if you don't, I'll try on a local copy and play with it, see what we see

As little time I've had lately to work on a pet project of mine that would greatly benefit from Claroline's functionality, I'm really happy to see that the ice has been broken and shared login's a possibility.  Thanks, Hugues.

I can see how Claroline could be integrated as a (huge) module (i.e. Claroline user menus) and bridge to its constituent components (chat, calendar, learning path, phpbb etc.) pairing, but it doesn't sound like a small undertaking. 

I'm not familiar enough with Mambo and Joomla yet to answer to your question. What I can say is that the driver is based on the user table structure of Mambo. If this table structure hasn't changed since Joomla, it should work on Joomla too.
[quote=∓quot;vavroom"\]Your driver fixes the userbase, but does it address the system integration itself? For example, if I want to load Claroline within my Joomla! site, unless I use a wrapper or an iFrame (which have inherent problems), I suspect it's not going to work.  Do you have any idea on a fix for that?[/quote]
You are right. For the moment, it should be difficult to make a so deep integration. However, it should be possible to go one step further if we can rely on Single Sign On (SSO) system. Does Mambo provide SSO possibility ?

Since version 1.8, Claroline offer two SSO solutions. First, Claroline is able to manage CAS authentication. Secondly, Claroline also offers its own SSO system based on SOAP web services. Beside, we think to extend these web services possibilities in the next version (so it could be another solution to explore).
If both system (Mambo and Claroline) are SSO connected, the integration could be quite interesting for the end user. It could be nearly transparent if the system administrator decides to harmonize both user interfaces.

Not strictly OT, but since WebCT was mentioned here....

Lawsuit Charges Online University Does Not Accommodate Learning-Disabled Students

A former Capella University student has filed a lawsuit against the online institution, claiming that it violated the Americans With Disabilities Act by using technology that does not accommodate his learning disabilities.....
He took courses from Capella as part of a master's program in information-technology-system design. After he completed one quarter at the university, in 2004, the administration installed a new software system, made by WebCT, for managing online courses. Mr. La Marca says he found the new setup confusing and difficult to work with. "It was just a navigational nightmare," he says. "It made it impossible for me to study."

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This thread was a great read! Still would love to know more about SSO 

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Single sign On (SSO) is an authentication process enabling user to authenticate once and gain access to multiple systems. For example, once authenticated in the library catalog, users don't have to re-enter their password to access their their web mail.

Claroline provides new SSO features based on the Central Authentication Service protocol (CAS), originally developed by the Yale University. CAS is one of the most used SSO systems in US Colleges and Universities. Its implementation into Claroline permits a seamless integration of this platform into existing organization Portals or Content Management Systems.

I have to confess I'm Joomla newbie. I don't know if it provides SSO features. But if this feature is available, it will considerably simplifies application integration without being forced to adapt code in dependent module.

As it is, Joomla doesn't have SSO services. Users are stored in tables, complete with encrypted passwords. There is going to be a LDAP bot, which will enable authentication against a LDAP server. It is a very good step in the right direction, this will give users the same name and password on multiple systemen, but this is no SSO.

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Take care

Trying to integrate Claroline in a Joomla wrapping ( login must wait)., but the problem is evry time You klik on som (3) of the function on the
Claroline front page, the page will jump out of the wrapping. To change this some of the fundamental HTLM has to be change.
<a href="/claroline1103/index.php" target="_top">, in a ref. like this “_top” has to be change to “_self”, but I can only change one of the tree. In banner.tpl.php I found tree “_top”. That I tried changing, having the consequence that, clicking on the name of the site, no longer coursed the page to jump. But there are to to go, the login and the “home” in breadcrume line. My programming skills are not good enough to find this “_top”’s and change them. The problem with the main.php in claroline 1103 is that they are not there, the main.php, in the browser window seems to be generated somehow. With make it difficult to find the rest. Does anyone have abilities or idée’s ?

Hi there
Claroline is a easy LMS, that could be integrated with CB login, I have read some post like this, but always I seen that moodle is the best choice, however i think Moodle have the same functions that joomla can do, so I t's better integrate claroline LMS to Joomla.. that is what I think ..