OER Hack Days / Additions to OERbit

An idea from the CETIS UKOLN OER Hack Days

Additions to OERbit, the very recently released Drupal based OER publishing platform that we use at Open.Michigan.


 * Write an installation script to automate a lot of the work around installing OERbit. The current directions have many, many steps so providing a script to somewhat automate the process will make it easier for people to try it. This can be done by stealing much of the code from the brilliant install script that has been provided for DiscoverEd. This is low hanging fruit and would be a bash script which may amuse anyone interested in looking into writing bash.


 * Index uploaded documents (as much as possible) in Apache SOLR. Currently the system indexes all the content created within OERbit, but doesn't look at uploaded resources. It may be worth investigating indexing of uploaded content using Apache Tika and similar stuff in the SOLR index. That way, we may be able to return results that are within uploaded resources in addition to the content created within OERca. Would be fun to investigate doing this with Clojure or JRuby using the reputedly fantastic Java Interop. Anyone interested in doing some exploratory programming or Lisp?

What was accomplished at the Hackday on 31/03/2011 and 01/04/2011
Testing installation.

We discovered that OERbit didn't work with PHP 5.3.x. Greg DeKoenigsberg from ISKME went through the install instructions on an Amazon EC2 instance running Ubuntu 10.10 and we discovered some issues with PHP version incompatibilities that required module updates.

We updated some of the included modules to handle errors encountered with PHP 5.3.x. We did install on an Ubuntu 10.10 system and have done some basic testing. It appears to be working.

Installing on Windows

Attempted an install on Windows Server 2003 and Robert Baker from National Rural rose to the challenge. He was able to get it going with the Wamp server and after a bit of fiddling the front page loaded. Currently struggling with url_alias issues on Windows.

Who
[mailto:lotia@umich.edu Ali Asad Lotia lotia@umich.edu] from Open.Michigan.