Here is an interesting idea I got from the Drupal CMS. The Drupal BlogAPI module allows one to "post" not just to their Drupal blog, but also to other content formats. Imagine being able to "post" a document while on the road using something like Ecto.
http://drupal.org/handbook/modules/blogapi
I've been dreaming about this all night!
I'm a peripheral developer who has done work on PmWiki, and I love how Ecto handles PmWiki's BloggerAPI. I've been creating a class in Moodle running on a slow old server, and while it's running like a workhorse, the horse is heading to pasture.
I have great ideas on how to implement the BloggerAPI end of it, although I haven't programmed for BloggerAPI before. It's not any more difficult than the work I did for PmWiki to support Podcasts and RSS properly. I had also gotten in touch with the Ecto developer and asked him to have the BloggerAPI for non-Blogger sites support more than just 20 posts...which he did very quickly!
If we stick to one API, such as the BloggerAPI, it would work in other programs as well.
Are you a programmer? I could use some help.
Thanks!
Criss
I'm a peripheral developer who has done work on PmWiki, and I love how Ecto handles PmWiki's BloggerAPI. I've been creating a class in Moodle running on a slow old server, and while it's running like a workhorse, the horse is heading to pasture.
I have great ideas on how to implement the BloggerAPI end of it, although I haven't programmed for BloggerAPI before. It's not any more difficult than the work I did for PmWiki to support Podcasts and RSS properly. I had also gotten in touch with the Ecto developer and asked him to have the BloggerAPI for non-Blogger sites support more than just 20 posts...which he did very quickly!
If we stick to one API, such as the BloggerAPI, it would work in other programs as well.
Are you a programmer? I could use some help.
Thanks!
Criss
I have a feeling people don't know what this thread is talking about, so I want to explain the xmlrpc/BloggerAPI/Ecto connection.
What if you, as a course instructor, could see a quick overview of content in your course and could edit simple content without having to wait for screens to load?
Ecto (and other Blogger clients) can read a group of pages and display the content in a heirarchical format. Here's what I'm picturing:
That's a little simplified, but under Course1, there would be entries for module1, and the category would be the type of activity it is.
See attached screen shot (showing a PmWiki installation. I use Ecto to meta-manage my wiki websites). When you double-click on an entry, another window comes up with the content of that entry -- the content of the activity in this case, the content of the wiki page in the case of my wiki. I can edit the page content from Ecto, and "publish" (re-upload) the content back to the site. In the case of Moodle, I would be able to use the Rich Text Format (wysiwyg) features of Ecto.
When you have a long and complicated course, this will save you tremendous time, because it takes far less time to get on to editing the next page, in fact you can edit multiple pages, copy & paste back and forth between them. There would still be features and settings one would have to go back to the website to handle.
Behind the scenes, Ecto logs in under your name/password and requests a news-feed of sorts from the website. The website only serves the important content data, not the templates and blocks, to Ecto. Ecto arranges the content in a tree format, and stores the content data on your local computer (if data changes on the site, you need to refresh Ecto's data files). You make changes or add entries (in this case activities) from Ecto, click "Publish" and Ecto sends a datafeed back to the website with only the important content.
This is not available in Moodle yet. If anyone knows which forum topic discussion of developing this feature would be appropriate, please let me know. I am a developer -- I've worked on security features, RSS and Podcasting support for PmWiki. If there were someone familiar with Moodle's database and data flow structures, it would save me a tremendous amount of time just figuring it out.
Thanks!
Criss
What if you, as a course instructor, could see a quick overview of content in your course and could edit simple content without having to wait for screens to load?
Ecto (and other Blogger clients) can read a group of pages and display the content in a heirarchical format. Here's what I'm picturing:
MySchool
Course1 M1.IntroductionToMyCourse category:text
M1.DiscussTheCourse category:forum
That's a little simplified, but under Course1, there would be entries for module1, and the category would be the type of activity it is.
See attached screen shot (showing a PmWiki installation. I use Ecto to meta-manage my wiki websites). When you double-click on an entry, another window comes up with the content of that entry -- the content of the activity in this case, the content of the wiki page in the case of my wiki. I can edit the page content from Ecto, and "publish" (re-upload) the content back to the site. In the case of Moodle, I would be able to use the Rich Text Format (wysiwyg) features of Ecto.
When you have a long and complicated course, this will save you tremendous time, because it takes far less time to get on to editing the next page, in fact you can edit multiple pages, copy & paste back and forth between them. There would still be features and settings one would have to go back to the website to handle.
Behind the scenes, Ecto logs in under your name/password and requests a news-feed of sorts from the website. The website only serves the important content data, not the templates and blocks, to Ecto. Ecto arranges the content in a tree format, and stores the content data on your local computer (if data changes on the site, you need to refresh Ecto's data files). You make changes or add entries (in this case activities) from Ecto, click "Publish" and Ecto sends a datafeed back to the website with only the important content.
This is not available in Moodle yet. If anyone knows which forum topic discussion of developing this feature would be appropriate, please let me know. I am a developer -- I've worked on security features, RSS and Podcasting support for PmWiki. If there were someone familiar with Moodle's database and data flow structures, it would save me a tremendous amount of time just figuring it out.
Thanks!
Criss
old post i know but has anything on this front for any of the common blogger/twitter/metaweblog api been implementer yet?