11 November 2010, 13:37

Hello,

Recently, we at Catalyst have been thinking more about integration of Mahara with other systems. Currently, we can have single sign-on via MNET with Moodle, but also other systems that support MNET can be connected, e.g. Drupal. With Moodle 2.0RC now being out, further integration with Moodle is possible via the Portfolio API and the Repository API.

The integration of Mahara with a content management system such as Drupal is very appealing for several reasons:
- use Drupal as web site / portal
- take advantage of Drupal's extensive list modules to enhance Mahara
- use Drupal content in Mahara without replicating it

What we could imagine for a Mahara-Drupal integration beyond SSL is for example that Drupal content can be made available in Mahara easily, e.g. web site content, multimedia content, quizzes. That could be achieved through the web services API that Drupal has. It could work similar to Gregor's GoogleApps plugin for Mahara: Get the URL from Drupal, put it into the Drupal blocktype and make the content visible in Mahara.

That way, content that is more easily created or managed in Drupal can stay there, but be pulled into Mahara comfortably.

So basically what we want to find out is whether there are others in the Mahara community, who'd be interested in linking Drupal to Mahara (and Moodle) and discuss this further.

Cheers
Francois, Josh, Richard, Kristina

11 November 2010, 17:32

I would love to see cck, views, taxonomy and search compatibility between Drupal and Mahara. It would even be better if all this could take place without complicating the user experience. I am thinking a colour coded menu system where the user is not even aware what system he/she is in would be neat.

23 November 2010, 21:50

Wow-nobody replying??

The past 2 days I had the opportunity to work with a very accomplished educational designer and Drupal and Mahara were discussed. Putting some functionality together and developing interconnectivity would be such an awesome thing. The possibilities are endless.

25 November 2010, 2:10

Hello Dirk,

I've been a bit remiss in forwarding your earlier post to Josh, our Drupal Architect at Catalyst. Richard and Francois are currently very busy on various things. We wanted to gather thoughts and had hoped for more comments. But maybe it's the wrong time of the year when everybody is starting to think about Xmas.

25 November 2010, 22:26

No problem. I was refering to the silence from the community and not the developers. ;)

25 November 2010, 16:14

Search compatibilty could be achieved using Apache Solr search I think. We'll need to get Mahara to index content with Apache Solr using the Drupal Apache Solr Module schema.xml file.

As for Views, CCK and Taxonomy, I think use cases would help determine how to integrate these functionality sets as Drupal is quite flexible, there are several ways to make this happen. We just need to find out which methods are most useful.

25 November 2010, 22:28

Thanks for the response. I think I know what a use case is and will write one up. Is there a software that helps creating use-cases?

06 December 2010, 14:54

Hello Dirk,

If you want to create use cases using an UML diagram, you could check http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unified_Modeling_Language_tools for some software. I haven't used any such software yet and thus don't know which one would be best.

Otherwise, it doesn't look like there is software around.

Cheers

Kristina

07 February 2011, 14:12

Coming in late on this...I'm very interested in this topic.

I have a Mahoodle implementation and am getting into a Drupal implementation. I think a Mahdrudle troika would be awesome.

I'm not sure where your discussions are at at the moment, but I really like what you were talking about in the opening message of this topic re using Drupal modules via web services.

That said, we need to deliver the Druapl project first. I'm hoping it will give us ideas on where to take things in the future.

I'm working with TDM as the company that does the technical heavy lifting.

15 February 2011, 10:26

This may be of interest:

Authentication Method: Drupal Single-Domain SSO

http://moodle.org/mod/data/view.php?d=13&rid=2941&filter=1

Saludos, Roberto.