eFront eLearning (LMS) integration plugin

@exeshop: Just to be clear, this is unrelated to your previous post regarding protecting the eFront directory correct?

The group feature is new to eFront so there is a chance there is some kinks to be worked out. What you are describing is that they missed a check in that you should not be able to assign a group a course lesson directly to a student outside of the course. As this behavior is unrelated to the aMember <-> eFront integration, I would suggest opening a bug in eFront or posting in the eFront Forums so the eFront development team can get it fixed for you.

@deafdavid: good call. sadly I have no magic thread locking powers. With the next revision of the plugin I'll start a new thread to try and divert some of the discussion to.

I've answered this over in the eFront Forums

To summarize:

After a bit of testing I managed to work out a solution to exeshops issue to prevent the url from not including the usertype (ie. student.php) in certain scenarios where course is assigned to a product.

I have updated the plugin attachment to include this minor patch. If you are not experiencing the problem it is not necessary to upgrade.

I'll be closing out this thread and introducing a new version of the plugin when eFront 3.5.4 is released in a few weeks. I hope to include rebuild db capabilities and incremental content support, among other things.

If you have any wish list items let me know now.

Thanks!

There have been no changes to the single sign on function of the plugin for a while (very straightforward setcookie function)..

What version of IE are you testing with? I've tested with IE 7 and IE 8 against eFront 3.5.3 and it appears to work ok.

Can you you try clearing your IE browser cache, deleting all cookies and restarting the browser and testing again?

If you are still having problems, send me an email [my username here @ hotmail.com] with a link to your site and a test student userid and password to use so I can check it out.

Are you doing anything such as hosting your aMember on a different domain that eFront? Subdomains are ok, but default browser security prevents setting a cookie on one domain for another domain.

Nothing special about how the plugin manages single sign on, it sets a couple of cookies using the standard PHP setcookie command (cookie_login and cookie_password) which is read by eFront to convert to a eFront user session.

Code:

setcookie("cookie_login", $member[login],time()+3600,'/','.'.str_replace('www.','',$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']));
setcookie("cookie_password", md5($member[pass].G_MD5KEY),time()+3600,'/','.'.str_replace('www.','',$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']));

Are you saying it worked with a previous version of the plugin but not the latest? That is odd. Either way, given your specialized environment you are better off emailing me directory ([my username here] @ hotmail.com) so I can get this sorted for you.

Note: With the release of eFront 3.6 I have updated the aMember integration plugin to 1.0.

Thanks for the tip Richard. I'll also go about seeing what I can do to encapsulate posts and gets better to allow for the use of special characters in the user/password/course/lesson names

Working on a new version of the integration plugin to make room for some cool things coming.

Attached to this message is the latest version. While I have it running in a number of production environments, it is beta so test accordingly. I will be flushing out any reports over the next few days and will update the primary link to the new version once I'm satisfied it is running well for everyone.

Some notable points:

* 60% less code
* runs 80% faster (makes use of cached tokens which reduces number of calls by 3/4)
* rich error handling
* better handling of escape characters in course / lesson / group names
* selectable option on expire/delete to unenroll (delete history) student from course/lesson or to deactivate (keep history)
* using CURL instead of FOPEN. If this is a problem (let me know), in a future version I will offer an option to switch between the two

Please let me know if you have any questions or difficulties.

(unzip attached files to amember\plugins\protect\efront directory)

@Sarah23: You may want to try the latest version of the plugin (v2b1 in above post) and see if that sorts out your special character issue. I still do not allow all characters (to prevent exploitation) but allow many more now. The new plugin is also 80% faster and has much richer error handling (aMember -> error/debug)

@Gates: Yes this is correct, if you are running 3.6+ of eFront you no longer need to replace the api.php as I have committed the catalog functions directly into eFront.

In the long term, there are a couple of outstanding bugs to resolve being able to use special characters in passwords as well as course / lesson names:

http://bugs.efrontlearning.net/browse/EF-598
http://bugs.efrontlearning.net/browse/EF-599

I want to have them sanitized on the eFront side to avoid having everyone that accesses the API to have to code workarounds.