Question

TWiki to integrate seemlessly within a Learning Management System

We're currently evaluating many wikis for educational use within a university. I have used Twiki in a previous position in a different uni and find Twiki to meet our needs in all requirements except one: It must integrate with our Learning Management System (Blackboard Vista 4.1.1) so that we can get our students and staff to focus on creativity and content instead of the logistics of another tool at another location.

We require multiple wikis (wikiwebs or webfarms) that can be isolated within particular courses/subjects.

Currently we can get "powerlinks" to enable MediaWiki and PMwiki within Vista, but i cannot find info on Twiki integrating within a LMS.

Theo Williams
e-Supported Learning Systems

-- TheoWilliams - 08 Nov 2006

Answer

It depends what kind of integration you need between the Learning Management System and TWiki.

If it is just at the level of automatic links you can add rules to the InterwikiPlugin link rule table. This assumes that your LMS is web enabled.

If you want to pull content out of the LMS for display in a TWiki topic you can do that in several ways:

• With server side include (if needed you can pull out a subset of a html page with regular expression pattern).
• With DatabasePlugin or DBIQueryPlugin, provided the LMS has a database interface
• With a custom TWiki plugin using some REST interface programming.

-- PeterThoeny - 08 Nov 2006