Month: June 2007

Cleveratom Move is delayed

Hal

Sigh. It was all going so well, too… ah well!

Yes, the solicitors involved in the move have decided to unpick all of the legal implications for us. In actual fact, I think it is only one solicitor doing it, but it’s hard to get to the bottom of what happens in the legal world. So, the long and short of it all is that we are still moving, but at the moment it is going a bit more slowly than it was.

In the mean time, we remain at Ongar – and what a brilliant set of people there. Deep gratitude to David (and Pam) who have made our lives so much easier. If only the rooms were bigger… !

Cleveratom move is on!

Hal

This time next week we should be in Chelmsford, running the business from very near the town centre! The countdown is ON!

The new address is:

Cleveratom Limited
Fenchurch House
93 Springfield Road
CHELMSFORD
Essex CM2 6JL

BT are fitting the phone today – new number to be announced soon, but the current 0845 number stays with us too (0845 868 9020)

And we have lots of work to do as well – still looking for employees and especially PHP coders who know their stuff and want to be part of a growing organisation.

Jaws Content Management System, Jaws CMS

Hal

jaws.pngLately, we have been looking at different types of CMS available and trying to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of each. It’s a tough task as you can imagine. However, for one reason or another Jaws has risen to the surface as a strong leader. It is still relatively new, of course and as such may not yet have the refinements of systems like Drupal, but it does have a relatively simple user interface which counts for a lot in my book. Sadly, the immaturity of the platform and the relative recency of its appearance means that there isn’t a great deal of useful information for those wishing to develop for it. As an example, try finding any information of any great depth about building a ‘gadget’. Sure, there is the meagre documentation and yes, there are plenty of gadgets which you could deconstruct, but what is needed is a reasonably detailed description of how these puppies hang together in the first place! Damian (Cleveratom employee no.4) has been looking into all this but it is tough one to crack. Using IRC he managed to chat to one of the core developers for a little bit of info, but not enough to get him really underway. So – does anyone have a good understanding of how gadgets are made for Jaws, and would you be willing to share it?

Horbury School, BSF, Learning Platforms, virtual learning environments

Hal

Horbury school is located in Wakefield and is undergoing a BSF process. They are also in the process of becoming a trust school, with languages as their specialism. Following on from the work we did in Yorkshire, reviewing learning platform implementation, we were asked to work with them as consultants to advise on their plans for the future.

As part of our visit we attended a presentation by RM on the next version of Kaleidos (v3). Whilst it was a Flash based presentation, I have to say that the feature set planned is awesome! Unfortunately, when we tried to log in to it to see for ourselves the whole internet service was deadly slow and so we didn’t really manage to get to see/do what we wanted. Partly down to RM? We don’t know.

However, Horbury are a long way down the road to implementing a learning platform and they are looking at using Moodle alongside a number of different pieces of software. The RM solution is still being trialled and tested, however, adn it should be interesting to see how this school develops. We were impressed with the determination and general understanding of the power of online learning from every teacher we met. The school certainly seems right on the cutting edge, and it would be brilliant to continue to support them.

Cleveratom Website

Hal

It’s been a while since we created the first Cleveratom website, and it has never been anything except a holding page linking out to our respective blogs and places we normally write to. However, that’s all set to change.

Over the next few days we are going to experiment with linking WordPress blogs together using RSS feeds to see if we can populate a central site from all of the sites currently being posted to by us. If it works, the Cleveratom site will have an instant makeover. If it doesn’t, we’ll try again with a different system. Current Favourites are the better CMS systems, and one I’ve not seen much of before is TypoLite… already installed, I’m finding out what it will do for us.