Trellis LMS Blog

TrellisTalk Now Available

2009-07-29T15:00:00.000-07:00

Learning.net announced today that Trellis, the company's Learning Management System (LMS) now includes a TrellisTalk plug-in that integrates full web-conferencing with other LMS functions to provide a fully integrated virtual meeting function for Trellis users.

Trellis 0.5.2 released!

2008-09-25T10:51:00.000-07:00

Just want to quickly announce the availability of the latest version of trellis, 0.5.2. I would consider this version stable as we have manually tested it extensively and have fixed all the problems that were found in it. This would be a good version to install and try out for yourself. We plan on releasing on more update to the 0.5 series before moving to our next milestone: 0.6.0.

ZendCon 2008

2008-09-18T17:15:00.000-07:00

The past few days I have been in Santa Clara, CA attending ZendCon 2008. I'm a little sad that it's all over; I had a great time there. It was my first visit to a coder conference, but definitely not my last. Some of the sessions were very interesting and very beneficial (when it wasn't a sales pitch), but the best part was getting together with other developers and sharing experiences and ideas. It isn't too often one is able to get together, in person, with a bunch of developers from all over the world. There were two things that really stand out in my mind from the conference. The first was Yahoo! Doku, Yahoo's twist on sudoku which Hourann Bosci, Rupert Hanson, and I solved using PHP and the second was a brilliant talk by Terry Chay on frameworks at the Un-conference. I really wish I got around to checking out more of the un-conference session--maybe next year.

The primary topics of the conference included testing and scaling--two things which are of great interest to me. We have been looking into the best ways to approach unit and general testing of Trellis as well as improving its performance and scalability through the use of memcache and mysql load balancing. The speakers spent much of their time explaining and encouraging the listeners to use testing or whatever other proceses or tool they were advocating, but did not spend enough time, in my opinion, discussing the challenges of adding tests or memcache which they or others have faced and how they overcame those challenges. Still, there was a great deal of useful information that will definitely help me take Trellis to" the next level".

I hope to see everyone again next year!

the initial post

2008-09-12T21:02:00.000-07:00

So I decided that Trellis needs a blog. Why? I think it's an important component of the open development process because it provides everyone with a look inside the minds of the developers. I have wanted to maintain a blog for Trellis for a while, but I realize that it requires a great deal of effort to write meaningful and interesting posts for which I was not prepared. However, we have recently achieved an important milestone in the development of Trellis; we have settled on many of the design choices and organized our ideas and the development process. It is now important that we introduce ourselves, the developers, to everyone so that they can get to know us and our project and send us some feedback. Feedback is what allows software (and really any public good) to maximize its benefit to its users.

My hope is that by reading this blog, you will get to know all the Trellis developers on a more personal level, see the challenges we face and how we overcome them, and maybe learn something, or even teach us something, in the process. I will encourage the other developers to post something here every so often. Feel free to leave comments or send us feedback--we will be listening!