The Entrada development team is pleased to announce that the Entrada 0.8.3.1 release has been tagged in our subversion repository, and has also been successfully deployed to the some local Entrada instances. This significant release is the result of the hard work of a number of individuals and collaborations, and it strongly represents the next step on our path to a 1.0 open source release.
Some of the newly introduced enhancements, although there are many more, include:
- New Permission System: The permission system that handles all of the access controls within Entrada was re-developed using the powerful Zend_ACL component of Zend Framework. This is a great example of our continued commitment to move towards a full embrace of the open source Zend Framework.
- New Learning Event Filtering Interface: A user friendly, highly functional Javascript multi-select interface was developed for the Learning Event filtering system. This new interface introduces find-as-you-type searches, filterable categories and more.
- New Clerkship Electives Component: Clerkship students now have the ability to submit their electives for approval directly through Entrada. Once the pending elective has been approved through a configurable work flow, the elective appears to the student on their official Clerkship schedule.
- Community Guest Users: Community administrators can now add guest users to their community who do not already have an account in the Entrada authentication system. These users will then only be granted access to the specific community.
- Community Mailing Lists: Each community in Entrada can now create and manage their own community mailing list, which is powered by Google Hosted Apps. Mailing lists can be configured to be announcement only (messages accepted and sent only from Community administrators) or discussion lists (messages accepted and sent from any Community member).
- Course Websites: Entrada Courses can now be “linked” to existing Entrada Communities, the result of which is a very powerful but easy to use content management system powering your course websites. This tight course / community integration also brings with it:
- A new template for course website “communities” that looks like the default Entrada interface.
- A consistent set of pre-defined pages that will make automatic syllabus generation possible.
- A course calendar that automatically displays scheduled Learning Events from Entrada for the course.
- Automatic administrator provisioning based on Course Directors, Curriculum Coordinators, etc.
- Community RSS and iCalendar Feeds: Many of the Community modules including Announcements, Events, and Discussions, have RSS feeds available on a per-page basis in this release. In addition any Events pages also have an iCalendar (ICS) feed that allows community members to subscribe to the calendar in many calendaring applications (i.e. Apple’s iCalendar, Outlook, Sunbird, Google Calendar, etc) as well as other mobile devices.
A full list of features and fixes are available in the Entrada 0.8.3 and 0.8.3.1 milestones in Trac.
Finally, I would like to give a special thank-you to Harry Brundage for his valuable development contributions this summer, and Dr. Lindsay Davidson of the REAL Project for providing his funding. Harry has been an important contributor to the Entrada team this past summer, and we look forward to his continued off-site presence while he attends McGill University. Also a special thank-you to Marta Majkut for her documentation contributions to the Entrada project over the summer, which will without a doubt be a useful resource to the Entrada user community for a long time.
For further information or clarification regarding information contained in this release announcement, please contact:
Matt Simpson
Senior Web Developer
Medical Education Technology Unit
School of Medicine, Queen’s University
Telephone: +1 613-533-6000 x78146