ELMS Alpha 6 was released yesterday and in keeping with our releases I wanted to do a recap of developments with the project and why it's important for the Drupal community at large. This release sees 22 features, 11 non-elms modules, 4 non-elms APIs, 4 elms specific modules, and 16 themes all be released to the Drupal community. Many of these things were out there in earlier forms of development but for the first time everything just mentioned is now available on drupal.org.

Read to the end for a list of all the components you can download individually if you like.

The Drupal community has picked up and helped via patches and co-maintaining several projects that are now central to ELMS environments. For this I am extremely grateful. Releasing all code to drupal.org was in large part because of the support of community members selflessly giving their time to help improve the platform. I've grown as a developer and a person as a result and I am honored to indirectly work with all of you.

The major changes in ELMS with Alpha 6 and why the larger Drupal community should care

ELMS remains the only distribution (to my knowledge) that is theme-independent. It accomplishes this through the use of the Regions API. Why is this so important for the community? Because it means that you have access to almost any Drupal 6 theme either that you can create or download from drupal.org

ELMS helps content authors ensure they are meeting accessibility requirements in the content that is produced. If you care to learn more about this, download the platform and see or just ask. It's a combination of the Accessible Content module and the HTML Purifier module.

You can now duplicate course sites with a simple button press via the Spaces OG Clone module. This module can also be used to clone project spaces in atrium while maintaining all references correctly (or seeks to at least)! Huge props to hefox on extrapolating the original code I had written for this.

All language of Courses and Course Versions / Offerings has been abstracted (thanks String Overrides module!). Why does this matter? Because ELMS is now based on a concept of Parent nodes and associated Site nodes (Organic groups) you can build other types of systems that have this similar micro-site to organizer relationship. I'll be presenting on this topic specifically at Drupalcamp Maryland this weekend! The first alternate install of ELMS will be as a collaborative learning environment (which ships with the distribution as well).

Many of the Features created for ELMS are kit compliant and should work in other distributions and drupal sites!

There is over an hour of video tutorials that ship inline with the system thanks to the advanced help module. This way you can learn about elms and drupal while using the system or access the channel on youtube.

List of Drupal.org releases

The future is bright, so excited for Drupalcon in March!