Hi Jay,

We’re continuing to develop Adapt Builder here at Learning Pool and are contributing back core functionality on a regular basis. Right now we’re focused on a new version of the Builder that is compatible with v2 of the framework. This is pretty much code complete and with our QA team so I’m hopeful we’ll be releasing this soon.

We’re also working on some plugins for our own customers and concentrating on ensuring that these deliver value for that audience and are using their feedback to push features back into the OS version – we currently have about 500 people using the tool. We’re hopeful that we’ll start to get some help with the development work on the builder soon to allow us to take a wider focus. You might have seen from the commits on this part of the project that all the work has been done by Learning Pool staff or people paid directly by us – clearly we’re hoping that some of the other contributors will help us carry the load. If that happens we’ll be able to make more functionality available to the OS project sooner.

I understand there’s a review being carried out by the steering group around how we take the project forward and make collaboration easier and better. With a bit of luck that will make things quicker.

In the meantime we keep working away on the workload we’ve agreed and will be starting to offer a commercial service around our fully featured version of Adapt Builder to new customers in the next few weeks.

Hope that helps

Paul

Hi Jay

TL;DR: I'd say to look to the Adapt collaborators' demos for examples of what's possible with Adapt, but don't assume that what you see will be available to the open-source community any time soon, or indeed at all.

One of the difficulties of working on an open-source software project is that introducing changes to the core codebase takes time (something that when working on live commercial projects is at a minimum); any proposed changes must be discussed amongst the core team to make sure that they align with the project. It is therefore sometimes necessary to develop and test any new functionality internally first. Additionally, and speaking from Kineo's perspective, a lot of the plugins are developed for very specific client/project configurations, and therefore would not be robust enough (or even useful) for general use. Any plugins we do think will be useful, usually require a fair amount of refactoring to ensure that they will stand up to a lot of different configs, and so can't be pushed out into the open immediately.

As a project, we've discovered through trial and error that trying to maintain individual forks of the core repositories causes more problems than it solves. We therefore try to propose any 'core' codebase changes to the core team/community as soon as possible with a view of getting these integrated as soon as we can get the resources to do so. You'll find that once a solution is agreed upon, things move pretty quickly.

Hope this clears things up a bit.

Hi Jay,

You raise a good point here. I personally fully support Learning Pools approach, and share your excitement as they are pushing the limits of the framework and authoring tool to create an outstanding product for everyone. 

There are a lot of companies on this community who work with Adapt (the company I am part owner in, Appitierre are also one).

Appitierres long term plan is to push back new functionalty and fixes to both the authoring tool and the Adapt framework - You can take a look at what Appitierre currently have on their site. If there is a feature you like, I will ask the developers to look at pushing this back in to the Open Source Adapt builder. 

For Appitierre (and other companies), taking things offline and developing outside of the community is the only way Appitierre can get things done quickly. It is much easier to develop a feature then commit it back as a whole and have a healthy debate at that point, this is very similar to how other open source projects also work. 

Many Thanks

Wes

Hi Paul & Tom,

Thank you for your elaborate response! I understand the process of Adapt's open source development better now. It is not my intention to come across as impatient I am just exited and believe strongly in the product, it's distribution and choice of development. It is therefore that I convinced the organization I am part of to start developing the first corporate e-Learning modules with the Adapt Builder. Due to the fact that the course developers are not software developers I installed the Builder on an internal server for all to use and develop their course modules in. The first and main requirement that made them doubt the Adapt Authoring tool was the lack to change/create a theme in the builder. Therefore when I saw this Theme Customization feature in a webinar and online video my attention was drawn.

Again thank you for your response, and I'll will wait patiently for any new updates the community might bring.

Hi Wes,

I thank you as well for your response and will definitely have a look at what Appitierre has to offer.

Enjoy your weekends