This page marked obsolete.
READ THIS FIRST: ClassForge, from the beginning, was a product to help give educational institutions a "free", Open Source alternative to other Web-Based Course Management Systems such as BlackBoard, WebCT, etc. My institution never really even considered ClassForge, as it wasn't glossy nor had a multi-million dollar company behind it. After our adoption of a proprietary CMS system, my interest in furthering development of ClassForge died.
The information below is intact and archived for nostalgic purposes, but is quite deprecated.
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What is ClassForge?
ClassForge is an Open Source tool for aiding in the platform-independant, location-irrelevant collaboration of students and academic faculty for classes, research, and projects. ClassForge is entirely web-based, and provides ease-of-use and functionality for higher-education students and professors to make use of high-end collaboration technologies. When will ClassForge be available?
ClassForge is currently in its final Beta and feature-development stage, with an anticipated production release in the Fall of 2000. When I have a more specific date, I'll update this section.
What features does ClassForge offer?
Below is a short-list of features that ClassForge touts:
- Message forums to facilitate group discussions
- Chat rooms to provide the means for real-time online class sessions and discussions
- e-Mail aliases and lists to provide a standard and common e-mail mechanism
- File upload areas for students to submit homework or other files to professors
- File download areas for students to retrieve files posted by professors
- Task/project management tools to allow project tasks to be assigned to individuals
- News posting engine to allow relevant new blurbs to be posted on the class site, or to the general ClassForge site
- Portal-based organization of student and professor classes and projects, to provide easy navigation to authenticated users
- Survey generation tool to allow structured feedback about ClassForge, and individual classes as well
- Fully customizeable class areas and portal pages
- Webspace for educators to create homepages and web applications in HTML, PHP, Perl, or Java
- 128-bit encryption security and authentication to aid against impersonation, vandalism and hi-jacking
ClassForge is also planned to support:
- Backups using Amanda, or any other backup software with a UNIX/Linux client
- Down-level encryption for international use
- Highly scalable system that supports clusters, server farms, local and wide -area server distribution, and high-availability technologies.
- BlackBoard Course Cartridges
There will also be a major effort to make ClassForge interoperable with the BlackBoard 5 Course Management System.
What is needed to run Classforge?
ClassForge is designed to run on any UNIX/Linux system that supports PHP, Perl and mySQL, however all development is done on Linux systems.
ClassForge components can be run on different servers as well. For example you might have one server that is your primary ClassForge web server, another web server that houses the class/project homepages, a couple servers that are database servers running mySQL, separate servers for DNS and e-Mail, etc.
I'm running ClassForge on a self-built server, with a 300mHz Celeron w/ MMX processor, 128mb RAM, 8gb disk. On that server is Redhat 6.0, mySQL 3.22, Apache 1.3.11 with mod_perl, mod_php, and mod_ssl to provide native PHP, Perl, and SSL support. This is fine for development, however production systems should be more robust, depending on the usage you anticipate.
ClassForge itself is entirely built using PHP and Perl (mostly PHP), with connectivity to local or remote mySQL databases. The databases store all of the information, the webservers merely acting as an interface.
Can I see it?
Feel free to explore the live development beta of ClassForge at http://classforge.potsdam.edu , or https://classforge.potsdam.edu - Some functionality will not be readily noticeable without a user account. I'll be more than happy to create a user account for anyone who would like to "play" with ClassForge.
Please remember that this site is under heavy development, and its state and functionality can, and does, change daily. Comments, suggestions, feature requests, etc. are always welcome.
Who develops ClassForge?
In its prime, the ClassForge Development Team had four developers, however Matthew Keller is currently the sole developer.
Can I help?
Sure! I can always use developers who know Perl, PHP and/or HTML. Although there is some documentation, I am scrambling desperately to find someone (or someones) to write HOW-TO's, guides, etc. Even if you don't want to write, and aren't a developer- Merely using the site and giving me feedback, suggestions and bug reporting is invaluable.
Why is it free? This is a commercial-grade product!
Yeah, isn't it great?! ClassForge is released under the GNU Public License, which protects it from becoming commercialized and/or closed. I strongly believe in the ethos of Open Source software, and release as many of my projects as possible to the Open Source community.