Month: February 2011

Profile2 1.3.14 released

I am proud to announce a new release of Profile2 in the 1.3 series

Version:
Profile2 1.3.14

Description:
Profile2 is a complete re-design and re-development of the existing Profile tool in Sakai. It gives you more of a Facebook style interface for editing your profile.
In addition you have a comprehensive set of Privacy controls to allow you to choose who can see what part(s) of your Profile.

With Profile2 you can post updates (integrated with Twitter), search for people with common interests, view their profiles, view their connections,
add them as a connection, and much more.

Profile2 can be run seamlessly alongside the existing profile in Sakai and integrates with the Roster tool.

Works with:
Sakai 2.4, 2.5, 2.6, 2.7, 2.8

Database upgrade:
This release requires a minor database upgrade. You will need to apply the relevant upgrade script that is located in the /docs/database
directory of the source code, or from here for those using the automatic binary installation:
https://source.sakaiproject.org/svn/profile2/tags/profile2-1.3.14/docs/database/

Availability:

Deployers running Sakai 2.7 should perform the following steps to upgrade:

  1. Update the in $SAKAI_SRC/master/pom.xml to 1.3.14
  2. Remove profile2-help-.jar and profile2-api-.jar from $CATALINA_HOME/shared/lib
  3. Rebuild/redeploy the core-deploy project to fetch the new release and install it into Tomcat
  4. Apply the database patch

Deployers building from source should perform the following steps:

  1. Checkout the 1.3.14 tag using the SVN link above
  2. Remove profile2-help-.jar and profile2-api-.jar from $CATALINA_HOME/shared/lib
  3. Build and deploy the 1.3.14 tag
  4. Apply the database patch

Highlights:
This is a maintenance release which fixes a number of minor issues identified in the 1.3 branch, including phone number validation and UI display issues. It also adds a Simplified Chinese translation and an updated Russian translation.

For full details of the features and fixes in this release, see:
http://jira.sakaiproject.org/secure/IssueNavigator.jspa?reset=true&pid=10500&fixfor=11948

And as always, for full installation and configuration instructions, see:
http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/PROFILE/Profile2

Known issues:
None

Acknowledgements:
Thanks to the following Sakai community members (in no particular order) for their involvement in this release:

Alan Berg
Seth Theirault
Gao Jun
Bryan Holladay
Matt Clare
Mike Ozornin

License:
Profile2 is released under the Educational Community License Version 2.0

Basic LTI Portlet for uPortal, 1.0 release

I am very pleased to announce the 1.0 release of the Basic LTI Portlet for uPortal.

This portlet implements the IMS Basic Learning Tools Interoperability specification and allows you to render any Basic LTI enabled application inside uPortal. Possibilities include Sakai tools, Peoplesoft components, tools from other LMS’s like Moodle and Blackboard, blogs, forums, wikis, the list is endless.

Features:

  • Allows a seamless integration between uPortal and any Basic LTI enabled application.
  • Uses Basic LTI and OAuth for a secure single-sign-on connection.
  • Completely integrate many different external applications into uPortal within minutes, instead of having to write web services to get the data and a new UI for each one.
  • Can be registered as a content type so that Administrators can configure multiple instances of the portlet to point to different sources or send different launch data.
  • Supports the CONFIG portlet mode for rich configuration.
  • Easily extended by way of ‘adapters’ – these essentially pre-process the launch data to cater for the specific needs of the various Basic LTI endpoints. Adapters for Sakai and Peoplesoft are included, as well as a standard no-op adapter for generic endpoints. Adapters for more applications are simple to create as well.

More information including a comprehensive installation and configuration guide, screenshots, project road map and architecture document, as well as information about creating new adapters is all available on the Jasig wiki: https://wiki.jasig.org/display/PLT/Basic+LTI+Portlet

Sakai Connector Portlet 1.1 released

I am very pleased to announce the 1.1 release of the Sakai Connector Portlet. This portlet implements the IMS Basic LTI specification and allows a user to render any tool from a Sakai environment, as a full featured application within uPortal.

The portlet is completely user configurable – users can choose from what site and what tool they want to render. Administrators can restrict the rendering of certain tools as desired.

This release brings a number of new features including remote session and launch data caching, and improved OAuth signing.

More information including a comprehensive installation guide are available here:

https://wiki.jasig.org/display/PLT/Sakai+Connector+Portlet

Time for a new blog

Lately I’ve been spreading my wings into other areas of development like uPortal, portlets, and even mobile apps. I’ve even launched my own software consultancy business (more about that later), but you wouldn’t have read about it on http://steve-on-sakai.blogspot.com because I kept that mainly to Sakai related stuff. Every time I wanted to write I held myself back because it might not have been purely #sakai related.

That, and Blogger/Blogspot is actually quite crap. It was extremely painful to write a post – something you’d think would be second nature to blogging software. In addition, not being able to have categorised feeds was extremely limiting. A few months ago they added a bunch of usability improvements to it, but that didn’t get rid of the foul taste I had in my writing mouth from earlier experiences.

So I finally took the plunge and migrated to WordPress. It imported all of my posts and comments with a few simple clicks, which was fantastic. I still need to clean up some of the junk that Blogger had in my posts but all of the recent ones are done.

So expect more articles as I now have the freedom to express.