Working in Learning Objects
Innovate, Comply, and now a Learning Object Repository. Not bad for one weeks work* (*I don't consider automation to be work). In the videos below I walk through the process of ingesting a Drupal 7 site produced as a stand alone. The site in question is an impressive learning object repository being worked on at Michigan's Virtual University. In the first video, I go from having a database and file structure of a site all the way to hacking elmsln's innovate tool in order to make it appear to be in elmsln via it's being inside the architecture. I also offer them advice along the way about how I may have structured the site differently as far as the Drupal setup and discover some cool modules they are using.
The second video goes a step further. I leverage the little talked about create-new-tool.sh script to automate the bulk of creating a new place holder for a tool in elmsln. It's the script that we've run to generate the stub code for all the systems currently in the network.
From that stub code I walk through the process of pulling the modules into scope of elmsln from their original site and then tricking the site into looking and acting like it's part of elmsln. I finish by bundling up their configuration via features and convert the site into a full on install profile. By the end, the LOR thinks that it was actually produced using the initial install script of elmsln which would have put it at a lor.elmsln.local style address; going so far as to show that the assets created and modified in LOR now are registered in our compliance system automatically. The most important part of this entire process in my mind is that I write very little code and actually modify very few files beyond what the automation provides.
From here, we could easily commit it to the ELMSLN repo to be part of new networks that would be setup. Discussions revolving around doing this and the additional functionality to do to it (as well as how to refactor it further) will play out in this issue in the queue.