schooltool-developers team mailing list archive

[Tom Hoffman <tom.hoffman@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

This year's SchoolTool roadmap has unfolded a bit differently than expected
due to a contract with a London-based charity called ARK (
http://www.arkonline.org/) to develop some specific features for a set of
schools in Uganda managed by another charity called PEAS (
http://www.peas.org.uk/).  Nearly all this code, minus a few very
school-specific customizations, will be made available in core SchoolTool
releases (under the GPL 2.0).

A report from ARK's point of view can be found here:
http://www.bringmoredata.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/you-want-free-school-information-system.html

The big news for many of you is that this contract is funding development
of a basic student fees tracking module.  We're finishing the first draft
this week, which simply allows you to create debits and credits for a
student, and print invoices, receipts and summary reports.  We will try to
make this available as a standalone package that can be added to current
SchoolTool instances soon.

We've added a link that unenrolls a student from the school, including
removing them from all their sections and groups as of the unenrollment,
and records a reason and destination.

We have added a view to allow clerks to record teacher attendance and
assign substitute teachers for specific days, including granting edit
rights to the absent teacher's sections to the sub.

PEAS wanted to simply record AM and PM attendance for all students, so we
added a view and reports to do that.

Finally, we are leveraging a recently open sourced ZODB replication service
(https://pypi.python.org/pypi/zc.zrs/2.4.2) to enable the school databases
to be automatically replicated to the PEAS central office, where they can
be viewed individually or have cross-school reports generated.  This is a
work in progress but very promising.

Finally, un-related to ARK, I've worked on a redesign of our "School"
management page, which has been a loose end since our big 2.0 redesign.
 I've attached a recent mock-up.  Hopefully it is more or less self
explanatory.  There would be no sidebar in this layout.  Your feedback is
welcome.  We'll aim to implement and release a redesign of the page before
the end of the year.

Thanks!

--Tom

Attachment: School Management Page.png
Description: PNG image