This course will become read-only in the near future. Tell us at community.p2pu.org if that is a problem.
This is an introduction to contributing to the open source platform that P2PU runs on: Lernanta. Lernanta is based on (also referred to as a fork of) Mozilla's Batucada project and is a Python/Django web application whose code is on GitHub.
We'll walk through the whole process together from getting the code, running it locally, finding a bug to fix, fixing the bug, and contributing the fix to the Lernanta project. Please see full description for more information.
Introduction to the group and each other
Communication
Try to use this platform as much as possible to complete this challenge. Help is also available via the p2pu-dev IRC channel and p2pu-dev mailing list, but more on that later.
Lernanta
Lernanta is the platform used to run the P2PU site. We are building on the codebase from Batucada, a rewrite of drumbeat.org by Mozilla. It uses Python, Django, Javascript, HTML, and CSS.
Writing Task: (Please post as a comment.)
What operating systems or programming experience do you have?
How do you wish to contribute to Lernanta? Contribute to the code? Run your own instance? Help with translation?
Also, how do you define open source? If you have good links, that's great. If you have experience, please share it. What are its strengths and weaknesses? Especially from the viewpoint of someone new?
Links:
I use Windows 7 primarily but have been working on moving development work onto Ubuntu, seems to be going well.
A week seems fair for the tasks.
From a contribution standpoint I don't have any experience in open source so I can't really comment on its strengths or weaknesses but I hope I can come to learn them over the next few weeks :)
Welcome, Faheem. I think this will be a great first open source project for you. And I can't wait to hear what you think during and after this :)
Most of the walkthrough is Ubuntu 10.10 tested. If you upgrade to Natty, I'd love to hear how it goes on there. I'm not upgrading my development environment for a week or so :)
I didn't hit post button twice. I do have the page open twice though. [notes for further testing since it seems others are having this issue too.]
Yeah, I've upgraded to Natty and all is well so far; let's hope I don't run into issues later on though.
Hi all:
Just to introduce myself and say a little about my background: I have quite some experience with free/open source software and open content collaborations (e.g. Emacs, PlanetMath, Etherpad, and now Planetary and P2PU). I don't know much about Python (having last used it over a decade ago) but I hear good things about it.
I also want to make sure participants in this group know about Shaping P2PU which would be a good place to take any very "high level" discussions or debates.
Joe
Not to confuse people with different places for discussions:
This here is the right place for discussion of all aspects of participating in, and using, p2pu.org.
As I understand Joe's study group, it's a more analytical (academic?) approach to understanding open learning communities, using P2PU as the example.
Hi All,
I'm a Front End Developer. I have 5 years professional experience. My specialties are HTML5, CSS3, jQuery, curretnly studying Java & Python. Haven't really come across anything I can't solve from a front end standpoint, so I hope to be a strong contributor in that way.
I don't have Open Source experience (other than a GitHub fork of Nivo-Slider where I added a feature) which is why I jumped on board here at P2PU. Looking forward to contributing, collaborating, and meeting good people.
Open Source weaknesses:
In my limited experience, I'd have to say keeping up with the dozens of simultaneous conversations being held on the email list. It sometimes takes the spare hour I have at the end of the night just to figure out what still needs fixing.
Open Source strengths:
It's a great way to meet talented like-minded people.
Looking forward to it! :)
Hi Andrew: documentation is always something worthwhile to work on. If you can understand something, make sure others can understand it as well (and vice versa). This will save future contributors the trouble :)
Cheers,
Joe
Thanks Joe! Not sure why my comment appears twice. I'm certain I only clicked submit once. That might be something to address. Anyone else had that issue?
James had a similar problem. Definitely something we could improve on. :)
And this is in reply to your post. Threading seems to be just one deep. Ah well :)
Yes, keeping up with all the conversations can be hard. There are some projects that are so high volume that stepping away for a week can take quite some time to catch up. Also, how the communications happen too. One that I've been working with very recently does a lot of discussion in IRC. I, and some others, will scroll up to see what happened when we come back to keyboard :)
I'm very excited to have you on board! We definitely have frontend work. Not to spoil the surprise, but one of my personal thorns is how the site looks in IE. There are others but that one sounds like you would be able to make it behave and bend to your will :)
Yeah, I think the threading only one deep is intentional. Not sure I agree with it though.
I think we really need to think deeply about how to structure information flows. Lernanta makes it much more "comfortable" to post, etc - just feels a lot more modern. But I can see it very rapidly being overwhelmed, the way it is now. There are also different ways of using the course pages - for some they will be the hub, and much of the activity will happen on external platforms (still means that it has to deal with a large amount of activity updates from different platforms, at different levels of granularity (one activity update for a big blog entry, ten for ten pictures updated), etc...
For other courses, we'd like to use the platform itself for really deep discussion.
There is lot's of research on this (using threaded discussion forums for online learning for example), and many examples to look at.
Hi Jessica. I'm pretty good at working with gte IE7 :)
Send the bugs my way!
Hey Andrew - Great to have you involved.
One area that would benefit tremendously from someone with front-end skills is the concept of "schools" within P2PU. Probably best to move this conversation over to the p2pu-dev list, where development related issues are discussed, but in a nutshell, schools are sub-communities that take ownership for certain content areas. They need similar social features as study groups have, but also aggregate some additional content. The input we are looking for probably goes beyond simple front-end stuff, but if you are interested in thinking through a slightly larger chunk of P2PU development, then that's an area that would be great to work on.
Dev list - http://lists.p2pu.org/mailman/listinfo/p2pu-dev
Best - P
Looks like Philip has snagged you for the school stuff. That is very important too. It goes to show we have something for everyone :)
Let's start the discussion on the dev list. I'm signed up. I'll see if I can be of assistance.
Yes, you've already done a wonderful service for Lernanta. Thank you so much for all the localization help including translation!
I think it is possible to develop a module for Lernanta. I've not done it before but we can definitely look into it. I think in Django, they're called "applications." I saw a few pages on how to make one so we could definitely look into that!
Hm - here's some feedback on this. I liked how the signup task showed the things we were supposed to do on reply. Here, I"ve pressed "comment" and I'm alraedy forgetting what we were supposed to be commenting on.
I think 1 week spacing sounds good. Looking forward to playing with the tasks the group comes up with.
I use a lot of operating systems - these days it seems like I use everything but Windows, which just feels odd since my background has so much Windows in it.
I don't remember the third thing :)
Hm - here's some feedback on this. I liked how the signup task showed the things we were supposed to do on reply. Here, I"ve pressed "comment" and I'm alraedy forgetting what we were supposed to be commenting on.
I think 1 week spacing sounds good. Looking forward to playing with the tasks the group comes up with.
I use a lot of operating systems - these days it seems like I use everything but Windows, which just feels odd since my background has so much Windows in it.
I don't remember the third thing :)
Another comment. (Why can't I see the message I'm replying to? Doh)
I obviously wasn't trying to double-post there. I guess maybe a wishlist bug would be to have the post button dim when clicked. I'm writing this from a train so perhaps that's not a normal circumstance. Either that or rate throttling on new posts since sometimes I find those javascript button disable type things annoying.
FInally, a way to delete my post (perhaps if I do it within 5 minutes of posting or something) would be nice.
Edit and delete of posts is on the wishlist :)
As is being able to see what you replying to, I think. I know it's something I really want. Perhaps it'll be one of the tasks you grab? Though focusing on testing the code is really important too.
I have been using GNU/Linux for around 5 years now. I have recently been learning about Python programming and am eager to gain experience by contributing to Free/Open Source software.
I feel that Open Source/Free Software mean sharing, cooperation, and collaboration. They are a part of our greater cooperative movement. Reclaiming the commons.
Is there any aspect in particular that you would like to focus on? For example: Frontend vs Backend? Really like security or design?
I've been developing on Ubuntu as are a few others so you should be able to follow the commands to grab the code and set up the environment pretty closely depending on your specific distribution. If you do find differences, of course, please note them and we can make a walkthrough for that OS.
Great point!
I guess post comments under the individual task pages? Looks like threading is coming which will make it easier to see who's replying to whom.
And threading is here!
as for communication durring this course, i say we "eat our own dog food" on this one and force ourselves to use the tools available from Lernanta. If in the event that we find ourselves lacking tools then all the better to contribute in new ways.
