Re: [seul-edu] Eval targets for ISO project Phase 1

[Jim Thomas <jthomas@leesburg.bittware.com>]

Doug Loss wrote:
> 
> OK folks, here are eight applications for us to look over and do a
> preliminary evaluation for their scholastic usefulness:
> 
> AbulEdu <http://www.abuledu.org>
> Alumni-Online <http://alumni-online.sourceforge.net>,
>         <http://sourceforge.net/projects/alumni-online>

I was fooling with Alumni Online a couple of weeks ago.  It needs a lot
of tweaking before it could be used by an organization other than the
one for which it was orignally developed.

1) A lot of the web pages it serves use graphics in the page headings. 
The graphics that come with Alumni-Online spell out the name of the
school at which is was originally developed.  The user would have to
come up with a new graphic to replace the existing one(s), or tweak the
code to use plain HTML in the page headings.

2) It was originally developed for a University - one of the fields in
the database is the student's department - not that applicable to a K12
setting.  An end user would want to tweak that out of there, or at least
change the names of the departments it lists.

It looks to me like you'd have to know a little HTML, PHP, and MySQL
before you could properly customize this app for your own school. 
Therefore, it does not yet live up to the "Simple End User" aspect of
the project. :-(  

But it might someday...


-- 
Jim Thomas            Principal Applications Engineer  Bittware, Inc
jthomas@bittware.com  http://www.bittware.com          (703) 779-7770
The problem with the future is that it keeps turning into the present -
Hobbes