Sakai forums

Sakai forums

by Michael Penney -
Number of replies: 17
The thread shows up in one frame, but when you click a message it re-scrolls to the top. You can't read replies from the message, you have to scroll back to the first message and then click the 'replies' icon.

You can't use the browser's back buttons at all, and the whole application needs to refresh the page every few seconds (really annoying in IE where it 'clicks' on every refresh). You can turn this off, but then you need to hit the refresh button to view any links, if you click a link with auto refresh off, it sends to to the last cached link rather than the one you clicked!

Links aren't really links and the browser buttons don't work (except refresh). I can't imagine trying to support this thing that works so differently from a usual web site/CMS.

Check it out: http://collab.sakaiproject.org/portal

And they call this "version 1.5", IMO it should be 0.15 if they used standard OSS versioning (where Postnuke is still 0.7.xsmile.


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In reply to Michael Penney

Re: Sakai forums

by Tony Hursh -
Wow, that's really clumsy. Way too much screen space devoted to navigation, especially to be as broken as it is.

It reminds me of the old WebBoard interface (that's not a compliment. smile)
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In reply to Tony Hursh

Re: Sakai forums

by Tony Hursh -
And it logs you out if you navigate away from the page.

Nice.

sad
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In reply to Tony Hursh

Re: Sakai forums

by N Hansen -
Boy, sounds like they have the same designers as my university recently hired to "upgrade" our webmail system. They don't let us use our back button and if we do, it logs us out. I'm constantly having to relogin simply to read my email. I can't stand it when designers think they are so clever they have to disable your browser's natural functions.
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In reply to N Hansen

Re: Sakai forums

by Tony Hursh -
Yes. Breaking the back button is one of the most reliable ways of ensuring that I won't visit a site again, unless forced.
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In reply to Tony Hursh

Re: Sakai forums

by N Hansen -
To be perfectly honest, I really liked Webboard at one point, and still think it is a nicely designed system (or at least versions of it from six or seven years ago).
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In reply to N Hansen

Re: Sakai forums

by Tony Hursh -
We found that the WebBoard interface didn't scale well. It got really, really slow after a certain number of messages were in the system. Clicking on the + sign to expand the message list would take an eternity, or so it seemed.

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In reply to Michael Penney

Re: Sakai forums

by Martin Dougiamas -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Moodle HQ Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers Picture of Testers
Wow, I hadn't looked at Sakai yet ... quite an eye-opener surprise
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In reply to Martin Dougiamas

Re: Sakai forums

by Tony Hursh -
Just think: all of those wonders can be yours for an annual fee of only $10,000 US.

smile
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In reply to Tony Hursh

Re: Sakai forums

by Zbigniew Fiedorowicz -
To be fair, that fee is for support.  The software can be downloaded for free.

Also, as I mentioned in another post, their calendar is not bad and has features which we might want to implement.
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In reply to Zbigniew Fiedorowicz

Re: Sakai forums

by Tony Hursh -
This is what they say you get for your money:

Access to SEPP staff:
Community development manager
SEPP technical staff

Early access to:
Roadmap decisions
Code Releases
Documentation

Developer training for writing Sakai tools

Exchange for partner-developed tools

Strategy and implementation workshops

SEPP Conferences


We get most of that (or near-equivalent) for free with Moodle.


I notice that they now have upwards of 60 partners (including my institution and yours). I wonder what Martin and team could do with an extra $600,000 per year? smile
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In reply to Tony Hursh

Re: Sakai forums

by Michael Penney -
I know, it kills me how much they've spent on this for what they've got to show for it, not to mention the extra millions they got from Carnegie Mellon!




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In reply to Michael Penney

Re: Sakai forums

by Tony Hursh -
I didn't know about the Mellon funding, so I googled it.

According to this page they got $2.2 million from the Mellon Foundation and $4.4 million from the "core founders".

Plus the ~$600,000/year they're bringing in from their "partners".

Yikes!



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In reply to Tony Hursh

Re: Sakai forums

by Ger Tielemans -
Talking about forums that suck: Moodle forum sucks when to many users use it and attach to big files... (Clever page break?)
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In reply to Michael Penney

Re: Sakai forums

by dave cormier -

Wow...

That certainly is something. What concerns me is that we are going to have to take it seriously from a LCMS analysis position JUST BECAUSE it's seems to be going through so much money. It's got lots of fancy names associated with it, an international sounding acronym and funds for publicity. There was a post somewhere in the annoucements that rang in my ears,

"wow, its so simple"

So tempting to respond with a "yes, I agree" but I'm going to have to review it anyway. To me it seems that, to their own detriment (IMO), they've gone for the ultimate standardization, making their announcements, chat and forum sections look almost exactly the same. I don't really understand what they've done with the back buttons, i'd love a better explanation of that if someone would care to post it. I just know they seem to send me a random distance backwards. Have they sent out requests for beta testers? Are they serious about release 1.5 (perhaps release 1.0 worked better)? Is there somewhere else where real posts by testers are being put?

dave.

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In reply to dave cormier

Re: Sakai forums

by Martín Langhoff -
"What concerns me is that we are going to have to take it seriously from a LCMS analysis position JUST BECAUSE it's seems to be going through so much money. It's got lots of fancy names associated with it, an international sounding acronym and funds for publicity."

You probably have to include it in the round up if you are evaluating LMSs, granted. But at the time of evaluating Free/Open Source Software, you have to consider the openness of the development process (cathedral-ness vs bazaar-ness), low barriers of entry to development, diveristy of parties involved directly in development, project leaders (people with charisma, I mean), life and evolution of the project and community, etc.

Having IBM on your side works if you already have those things that make a FOSS project successful. But Sakai is very transparently an old-school cathedral project, with an open source license. Oh, and a license to have access to the developers. (Ack?! What???)

Not a FOSS project in spirit and dynamic, not at all.

Compare any of the BSDs with GNU/Linux distros -- not today, but roll back time perhaps 5 years. And see how the BSDs have lagged because they are less bazaar-like than the Linux kernel plus the zillion projects that make a distro.

More to the point, compare the low barriers of entry, and how smart people know that the real 'feature' of FOSS is easy customization:

- Exhibit A - Concerns over Sakai
http://www.earlham.edu/~markp/cms/reports_proposals/MITC/MITC_position_sakai.php

- Exhibit B - While we tested, we naturally started customizing
http://www.learningtoo.info/scottblog/?p=90
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In reply to Michael Penney

Re: Sakai forums

by Zbigniew Fiedorowicz -
And here is what the W3C html validator has to say about the Sakai portal page:

Address:
Server: Apache/1.3.32 (Unix) mod_jk/1.2.6 mod_ssl/2.8.21 OpenSSL/0.9.7e
Content-Type: text/html
Encoding: utf-8 (detect automatically)utf-8 (Unicode, worldwide)utf-16 (Unicode, worldwide)iso-8859-1 (Western Europe)iso-8859-2 (Central Europe)iso-8859-3 (Southern Europe)iso-8859-4 (North European)iso-8859-5 (Cyrillic)iso-8859-6 (Arabic)iso-8859-7 (Greek)iso-8859-8 (Hebrew, visual)iso-8859-8-i (Hebrew, logical)iso-8859-9 (Turkish)iso-8859-10 (Latin 6)iso-8859-13 (Baltic Rim)iso-8859-14 (Celtic)iso-8859-15 (Latin 9)us-ascii (basic English)euc-jp (Japanese, Unix)shift_jis (Japanese, Win/Mac)iso-2022-jp (Japanese, email)euc-kr (Korean)gb2312 (Chinese, simplified)gb18030 (Chinese, simplified)big5 (Chinese, traditional)tis-620 (Thai)koi8-r (Russian)koi8-u (Ukrainian)iso-ir-111 (Cyrillic KOI-8)macintosh (MacRoman)windows-1250 (Central Europe)windows-1251 (Cyrillic)windows-1252 (Western Europe)windows-1253 (Greek)windows-1254 (Turkish)windows-1255 (Hebrew)windows-1256 (Arabic)windows-1257 (Baltic Rim)
Doctype: XHTML 1.0 Transitional (detect automatically)XHTML 1.1XHTML Basic 1.0XHTML 1.0 StrictXHTML 1.0 TransitionalXHTML 1.0 FramesetISO/IEC 15445:2000 (ISO-HTML)HTML 4.01 StrictHTML 4.01 TransitionalHTML 4.01 FramesetHTML 3.2HTML 2.0
Root Namespace: http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml
Errors: 47

This page is not Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional!


And from Cynthia Says we get:


Verification Checklist
Checkpoints Passed
508 Standards, Section 1194.22 Yes No Other
A. 508 Standards, Section 1194.22, (a) A text equivalent for every non-text element shall be provided (e.g., via "alt", "longdesc", or in element content).
  • Rule: 1.1.1 - All IMG elements are required to contain either the alt or the longdesc attribute.
    • No invalid IMG elements found in document body.
  • Rule: 1.1.2 - All INPUT elements are required to contain the alt attribute or use a LABEL.
    • No INPUT Elements found within document
  • Rule: 1.1.3 - All OBJECT elements are required to contain element content.
    • No OBJECT elements found in document body.
  • Rule: 1.1.4 - All APPLET elements are required to contain both element content and the alt attribute.
    • No APPLET elements found in document body.
  • Rule: 1.1.6 - All IFRAME elements are required to contain element content.
    • Failure - IFRAME Element at Line: 38, Column: 28
    • Failure - IFRAME Element at Line: 73, Column: 4
    • Failure - IFRAME Element at Line: 89, Column: 6
    • Failure - IFRAME Element at Line: 105, Column: 4
    • Failure - IFRAME Element at Line: 121, Column: 6
  • Rule: 1.1.7 - All Anchor elements found within MAP elements are required to contain the alt attribute.
    • No MAP elements found in document body.
  • Rule: 1.1.8 - All AREA elements are required to contain the alt attribute.
    • No AREA elements found in document body.
  • Rule: 1.1.9 - When EMBED Elements are used, the NOEMBED element is required in the document.
    • No EMBED elements found in document body.
   No  


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