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Higher Walls Plugin for Elgg

November 2, 2008 in Elgg, Policies, RSS, Social Networking, Technology, open source | 7 comments

I plan on using Elgg in a K12 environment, particularly my fifth graders. In order to do this in a manner that complies with our school policies and culture, I had to make some changes. Since the Elgg environment is unmoderated, I had to remove all public access to content.

Elgg’s “Walled Garden” does part of the job in that it disables public registration, but any content that users created had the option of public access which would be visible to individuals not logged in.

I created a plugin with a view override that removes this option. Now users have the choice of private or logged in users (along with any friends’ collections) when setting the access to content.

Still, access to the site could be had by RSS feeds and OpenDD. I’m not sure how big an issue this is, but I’d like to be able to do it. Dave Tosh suggested, I created an override of owners’ block eliminating those options. I believe access to these can be had unless I delete the rss and opendd views from the core. That will work, but I wonder if I could create an override of those views that disables them. I plan on looking into this.

No links to subscribe to feeds

I combined my initial plugin, with Marcus Povey’s “Walled Garden.” With “Higher Walls,” not only is registration disabled, but so is public access. Links to RSS and OpenDD feeds are also disabled.

Another issue remains. If access to content is restricted to logged in users, then the Latest Activity on the default main page will remain as a header with nothing below it. I used Customindex plugin to change the mainpage to a login page by pasting:

$form_body = “<p><label>” . elgg_echo(’username’) . “<br />” . elgg_view(’input/text’, array(’internalname’ => ‘username’, ‘class’ => ‘login-textarea’)) . “</label><br />”;
$form_body .= “<label>” . elgg_echo(’password’) . “<br />” . elgg_view(’input/password’, array(’internalname’ => ‘password’, ‘class’ => ‘login-textarea’)) . “</label><br />”;
$form_body .= elgg_view(’input/submit’, array(’value’ => elgg_echo(’login’))) . “</p>”;
$form_body .= “<p>” . elgg_echo(”) . “</a>  <a href=\”". $vars['url'] .”account/forgotten_password.php\”>” . elgg_echo(’user:password:lost’) . “</a></p>”;
echo elgg_view(’input/form’, array(’body’ => $form_body, ‘action’ => “”. $vars['url'] .”action/login”));

into customindex/views/default/customindex/content.php.

Further modifications could be done on the custom index, but this certainly serves the purpose. It is comparable to what one would encounter in a password protected WordPressMU blog.

Now I am convinced that Elgg can be modified to work within the K12 environment. Higher Walls and removing rss and opendd views directories restricts access to the community very effectively. A better solution would disabling rss and opendd through the plugin rather than deleting core files.

Now that these matters appear worked out, I plan to focus more on Elgg in terms of pedagogy. Nonetheless, I will tweak “Higher Walls” over time.

Download

Thanks to:

  • Marcus Povey
  • Boris Glumpler
  • Jens von der Heydt
  • Diego Andrés Ramírez Aragón

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K12 Elgg Security

October 19, 2008 in Elgg, Policies, RSS, Social Networking, Technology, open source | 3 comments

Elgg 1.1 is arriving soon. The project is maturing with more plugins and themes becoming available. It’s time to plan for deployment in the K12 environment. I have been mulling over several special issues in deploying Elgg in a K12 public school setting. I invite you to join the K12 Elgg group on the Elgg Community Website. I am also considering Web publishing and educational technology issues in my Educational Technology Policy Site. Policies need to be in place for working with Elgg and other Web 2.0 applications.

The first thing we need to consider is security. In our situation we will need to have a walled garden. Our school requires anything that is open to the world on the Internet be moderated. Since we cannot moderate in the Elgg environment, all content will have to be kept in house.

The Walled Garden plugin from the Elgg developers does much of what we will need. It disables registration so that  any user accounts must be created by the admin. This prevents outsiders from registering and gaining access to student content. It falls short in a couple ways. As configured, users can choose to make content available to the public under the access controls. In addition RSS feeds could allow outsiders to view content if they obtained the appropriate urls.

In response to my concerns expressed in the K12 Elgg area of the Elgg community, Dave Tosh offered some solutions. He pointed to engine/lib/access.php as the place to eliminate the “Public” option. Students will only be able to select permissions for access to people within the site: private, logged in users, or any collections of friends. I plan on creating a plugin offering this functionality soon leaving the core intact for easy upgrading.

With RSS feeds, Dave suggested that I eliminate the options to subscribe to an RSS Feed and Syndicate OpenDD from the owner’s block menu, then delete RSS and and OpenDD views in the views directory.

Dave is looking into administrative options to toggle public access OpneDD and RSS feeds from the administrative interface. I think this is a good idea that will make it more appealing to the K12 audience out-of-the-box.

If we allow students to work in Elgg without moderation, we need a way to monitor what the students are doing so that they are accountable for their behavior on the site.

Elgg offers several tools to this end. There is the log browser with the ability to refine the results by username and by start/end dates. As admins, we can click on a user’s avatar menu and explore their log. There is also the user option to report content to the administrator.

Use of the log options require active searching and the logs have a lot of entries not related to content. Are there ways to filter out some of the non-content related noise making it easier to monitor students? Would it be possible to create plugins to make this process easier?

These are just a couple areas of concern that I will need to address with school administration and tech committee before deploying Elgg. I hope to have answers to the questions that I know I will face. I’d like to hear what others have to say about these matters. Please comment!

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Making More Posh Widgets

July 26, 2008 in RSS, Technology, open source | No comments

Posh, the open source portal page resembling PageFlakes, comes with a few widgets in its default installation. A handful of other widgets can be found on the Portaneo website. In order to make this software as appealing and as functional as PageFlakes for student, class, or school use, it would be great to have more options. As I discovered there are well over 100,000 options. Google Gadgets and Netvibes Widgets can be implemented as widgets using Posh’s Advanced Widget Wizard.

There is a dizzying array of Google Gadgets and Netvibe Widgets: games, music, video, calendars, clocks, and more. Check them out yourself with the links above. Essentially, they provide little snippets of code that can be added to websites to feed the desired content.

The first step in making the widget is getting the code. First we will look at how to get the code for Google Gadgets. Go to Google’s gadget directory.Note that you can search widgets or browse categories.

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Once you have picked a gadget, click on the “Add to your webpage button.” Usually, you are then given options for customization. What needs to be configured depends upon the gadget. The default width for most is 320 px. That is a little too wide for the default 3 column layout, so you probably want to bump that number down a little. Sometimes you need to enter a little information into the code manually, but it is usually clear and simple.

Click to enlarge

Click to enlarge

You many preview your customization or get code.

Simply copy that code onto your clipboard so that you can paste it into the Widget Wizard.

Now Let’s go and get some code for a Netvibes widget.

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Find the widget of your dreams and click on it:

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You may or may not have configuration options. In this case there are none. To get the code. click on the share button. Grab the text of the code and have it ready to paste into the Widget Wizard.

Now that you have your code, log in as admin on your Posh installation. Click on Widgets Management.

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Click Create a new widget.

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The click Add your advanced widget to get this page:

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Simply paste your code to replace the highlighted text on the page above. Click the test button to make sure it works. If you are successful, click add. (Note, there are links to widgets on the page with an alternative procedure which I found confusing). You will be prompted through the next few pages to name and customize the widget somewhat, and you are done. Your new widget will now appear on the list of options. To make things even more interesting, users can do the same, but their submitted widgets must be approved by an administrator.

Posh certainly caught my attention as a slick open source alternative to hosted solutions. I believe it could be very useful as a student or classroom portal. Now that I discovered a nearly unlimited source of widgets. it is more appealing yet and will undergo more exploration. The widget wizard is a nice implementation that may well be suited to other server side applications. Posh appears to be an open source receptacle for open standard APIs.

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Students Start Using RSS

February 2, 2008 in Blogging, RSS, Technology, open source | 1 comment

I was satisfied with my trial of the open-source RSS reader Rnews. While it is not perfect, it has a very simple interface that was easy enough for my students learn. I installed the program on our school shared server space and set up accounts for them. Thursday, they started populating their account with feeds from their classmate’s blogs.

Rnews has a very simple, clean, no-nonsense user interface. It is not as cool as some might want it and it does not support themes. Changes of appearance can only be done by editing the css file. Students add feeds by clicking the blue plus sign on the upper right side (see below). There are a few other controls that are straight forward and students are unlikely to get themselves into trouble.

Screenshot of Rnew Reader

One problem with Rnews, is the lack of an administrative interface. To an extent, this program is so simple, there is little need for it. On the other hand, there is no way of monitoring the feeds to which the students have subscribed within the program. This can be worked around by examining the MySQL database through phpMyAdmin–which is fine if you have access. It works for me, although, it would be nice to be able to browse all accounts as an admin. Of course the lack of such features keeps this program nice and lean. Registration requires a secret pass phrase. Student must log in to their individual readers. There is no access without a log-in.

Students thought the RSS reader was very cool because they were able to see all the blog posts at once. After they logged into their readers, I modeled subscribing to feeds. Feed URLs must be typed in. Many students had errors with their first attempts, but soon became much more attentive to details and began typing more carefully. Since each feed required a url for the blog and one for the feed, students got plenty of practice with cutting and pasting shortcuts.

The kids see the utility of the RSS reader. They also like having their own personal account to manage. Between this and their blogs, they feel empowered. Students can publish and control a part of the web plus they can show their friends and parents. Next, I plan to give them some feeds beyond those of our class. I also plan on creating a class RSS reader using a more full featured platform. I hope to demonstrate the benefits of a class RSS reader to other teachers.

Rnews works fine–it gets the job done. I will continue searching for and testing other open source server side RSS aggregators for future applications. I look forward to seeing how this impacts my students.

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