DoudouLinux CD

My first blog is a idea which consists in embedding in DoudouLinux a small blog engine to teach children the use of blogging software. Pages would be served locally only and preferably without the need of logging in for modifications. The PDF printer can then be used to export pages.

Rationale¶

Almost all children oriented distributions ship a standard office suite. These softwares are not included in DoudouLinux for the following reasons:

• they take too much disk space (> 100 MB)
• they are over-featured (= too complicated)
• they are not so useful at home, so poorly useful for children
• in the professional life, people tend to only use office suites because they are taught to use only these softwares (-> they are not efficient and cannot work anymore if you remove this software)

Moreover we can add the following:

• some non technical users agree to say that online blog, wiki, CMS, etc., are much easier to use
• office suite cannot let users publish to websites easily and are then old-fashioned
• office suites, may they be online software services, are subject to software vendor monopoly, which is not the case of the CMS tools family

For all these reasons we feel that a small but easy to use blogging software would be a good idea for inclusion in DoudouLinux.

Requirements¶

Here are the requirements for such software:

• do not cause privacy issues -> publish locally only, not online – an online version could be set in the future but parents will need to accompany their children
• be simple to use -> provide the strict minimum number of features
• be attractive -> artwork required
• avoid installing over-featured extra software such as Apache, MySQL
• try to use already installed programming languages, particularly Python, instead of installing a new language such as Php

Please note that the Tcl language is currently only needed to make vkeybd run. It will disappear when we will definitively switch to Debian Squeeze since vkeybd will then be replaced with the nicer vmpk.

Feature request¶

• markup syntax to avoid typing Html!
• try to use a quite standard markup syntax
• be able to include images in text
• management of categories
• classification of posts by month
• avoid the need of logging in to edit posts
• use standard XHtml preferably
• easy access from the web browser, ie. a simple local URL

Additional ideas¶

• a tool to export the blog database
• provide an online service to produce a PDF book from the local blog or a software package that would do this (it may not be installed by default)
• online version of the blog with parent agreement and restricted access
• a collaborative blog in the kid’s corner, with a publication process similar to the Spip one (ie. DDL team approve kid’s contribution before publishing online)