[Tikiwiki-devel] LauLima: TikiWiki fork from 1.8.2 for Edu (UK)

[Xavier de P. P. <xav...@ub...>]

Hi again:

Some other information that might be of some interest (reusing code? 
getting ideas?).

We got a post in edu.tw.o reporting about "LauLima", which seems to be a 
fork from Tikiwiki 1.8.2 developed in the uk for educational scenarios.

They changed the permission system in Tikiwiki for something related to 
roles, etc.

Link to the post at the edu.tw.o forum:
http://edu.tikiwiki.org/tiki-view_forum_thread.php?topics_offset=1&forumId=2&comments_parentId=141

More info on LauLima (respect to TikiWiki) (see below)
http://onlinelearning.dmem.strath.ac.uk/laulimaforum/viewtopic.php?t=8

Screenshots
http://onlinelearning.dmem.strath.ac.uk/laulimaforum/viewtopic.php?t=9

Download LauLima
http://onlinelearning.dmem.strath.ac.uk/laulima/tiki-download_file.php?fileId=12089 


LauLima User Forums
http://onlinelearning.dmem.strath.ac.uk/laulimaforum/


        =========================================================
        From: http://www.didet.ac.uk/system/overview.htm


        ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
        The LauLima System

The DIDET project used the open source wiki product 'Tikiwik 
<http://tikiwiki.org>i' to create LauLima. Tikiwiki was extensively 
customised and enhanced to produce LauLima which incorporates a learning 
environment and digital library, both with a powerful permissions 
system. The two discrete elements of LauLima are shown below.

LauLima System Architecture


=========================================================
From: 
http://onlinelearning.dmem.strath.ac.uk/laulimaforum/viewtopic.php?t=8
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
There follows some background information about LauLima

LauLima is a modified version of open source TikiWiki project 
(www.tikiwiki.org), customised for team-based collaborative projects.

LauLima has been developed at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, 
U.K.(www.strath.ac.uk), as part of the didet project (www.didet.ac.uk) 
that was funded by JISC.

The released software is a developmental snapshot with some features 
removed to comply with software licences and to hopefully help it to be 
deployed elsewhere. Developmental work has carried on, and a number of 
parts of the code have been rewritten or optimised, but these have not 
been released yet.

The software is released under the LGPL. No guarantees are made 
regarding its fitness for purpose, and it is used and installed at your 
own risk.


Background
LauLima is developed from TikiWiki v 1.8.2 and has been customised 
extensively during the course of the project that its development was a 
part of.


What makes LauLima different from TikiWiki?
The relationship between LauLima and TikiWiki is very similar to the 
relationship between humans and chimpanzees. Humans and chimpanzees are 
99% genotypically identical yet phenotypically very different. LauLima 
has its own code, but shares a lot of code with TikiWiki, but is very 
different in application and use.

The primary difference between the two systems is that LauLima has a 
very granular permissions system that has been integrated through the 
main components of the environment (though not areas that weren't 
immediately beneficial to the project that LauLima was developed for). 
TikiWiki has an access control mechanism that it calls permissions, 
however, in all further mentioning of the access control mechanisms in 
LauLima the following naming convention will be followed. The access 
control mechanism originating from TikiWiki will be referred to as 
capabilities, and those that were developed for LauLima will be referred 
to as permissions.

LauLima's permissions system allows the owner of an object (wiki page, 
blog, file, file gallery etc) to control who has access to that object, 
and what access they have. The 'who has access' can be defined in terms 
of individuals, groupings of individuals, or if the owner has the 
capability, they can make the object accessible to the world (any 
Internet user). The 'what access' includes create, read, write or 
delete. The software was developed in an educational context, and as 
such certain categories of users need to be able to view other users' 
work. There are capabilites built into the system that allow the 'Staff' 
group to view the material owned by the 'Student' group (this is 
customisable and certain conditions apply - more later).

A second major difference between the two systems is that LauLima is 
viewed as being in two parts, the LauLima Learning Environment (LLE) and 
the LauLima Digital Library (LDL). The LDL is a component that has been 
developed to allow materials produced in the LLE to be moved to the LDL 
for long-term storage. The LDL can be browsed or searched to find material.

LauLima has many other features that were not part of the system from 
which it was developed they will be detailed later.

Application
LauLima was developed for use in team-based collaborative projects, 
specifically in higher educational design-related projects. However, the 
software could be used for many purposes, the strong and flexible 
permissions system making it useful in many settings, not necessarily in 
an educational context.

Scalability
Currently our LauLima system supports over 500 registered users on a 
single 3GHz Xeon processor server with 2GB RAM and 250GB RAID SATA hard 
disks. That hardware is sufficient for adequate performance with 
approximately 40 concurrent users heavily using the system, and more if 
they are lightly using the system. LauLima, like TikiWiki on which it is 
based, is resource intensive in terms of database queries required per 
page generated, some work has gone into this as part of LauLima's 
development, but more optimization is required if larger numbers are to 
be supported concurrently, or if hardware available is more modest than 
that quoted. A number of strategies are documented for improving 
performance on a given hardware platform. That said, LauLima can easily 
be run on modest hardware for small organisations and projects without 
giving performance issues much thought. Future development will optimize 
both the database (which has poor optimization in a number of places), 
and reduce the number of queries required to generate a page).

The LDL component has been substantially rewritten since this release, 
and is vastly improved in terms of performance. However those changes 
have not yet been released, and also restrict the database that can be 
used to MySQL. No such restriction applys to this code.