Teleteaching tool, batch user, batch titles, titlestrip, comment search

[jvt]

 
Please moderator move this to the proper thread, if any.

Dear all

First of all I'd like to thank you all for this nice piece of
software.

I use it not as a photo gallery tool but as a student support tool
for a graduate course. I came to coppermine because neither moodle
nor dokeos allowed the students to comment and discuss on specific
course slides (not a flaw: I use moodle in several other
teleteaching courses, and it has many other useful features...that
I didnt need in this specific one). So the idea is to upload the
course slides as photographs, to upload the students as users, and
to allow them to comment/ask/discuss on any slide, eventually
answering questions myself.

To fulfill the task, I had to make some modifications on the
standard package (yap!, sure I shouldn't). This is my first contact
with php or sql (though I learnt sql as a student myself er..mm..20
years ago -no, it's not a typo), so you may expect a
straightforward (i.e. dirty) approach.  I wonder if my solutions
will be useful to somebody, but I felt in debt with the generous
people that make this tool so useful for me.  My only concern is
that my skills are not enough to gracefully integrate these
features in a plugin/theme/whatever.

So, some things I needed and managed to get:

- Multiline comments. I got and installed the plugin from the forum. 

- A theme that loosely matches the University palette. I painfully
  modified the "proorange" theme, widened it a bit and modified some
  colors.

- Batch user adding in "addusers.php", hacked from code posted
  somewhere in this forum.  I use one of the custom fields in the
  profile to hold the student full name (which cannot be modified
  by the student, "usermgr.php"). Users can be assigned to a course
  group, so I can have several courses with separate users.
  Existent users are 'updated', so they may belong to several
  course groups. Group membership may be batch-canceled, too.

- Some minor translation in the spanish version: no 'albums' but
  'lessons' and so on.

- Automatic title loading from the batch upload feature. I use
  Powerpoint (beg your pardon) to make the slides, and some time
  ago I developed a macro to publish the slides in our web server.
  It automatically generates a directory with the "photos", grabs
  every slide title and stores them in an html file to navigate
  through the slides
  (http://trajano.us.es/docencia/Conmutacion/temas/b00intro/ , you
  get the point). I modified the "searchnew.php" and "addpic.php"
  file, so when I upload a directory the html file is parsed and
  the titles extracted and associated to the proper slide. This
  allowed me to upload and title more than 750 slides without pain.
  The macro code is in "macro.txt".

- Replace filmstrips by "titlestrips". The filmstrip (which is
  vertically oriented in the original "proorange" theme) is
  replaced by a list with the titles of several previous and next
  slides in the gallery. See the attached image.

- Searchable comments in "search.php", "include/search.inc.php",
  "thumbnails.php". I'm aware it slows down the queries, but in
  this case it deserves the price to make the tool really useful
  for my students, and also for me.

So here it is. Feel free to ask.