Jonesieblog

FreeMIS is an Open Source, web based, school management information system which I developed in the mid noughties.

A lot of people arrive at my blog looking for information about FreeMIS. If that’s you, this post should provide you with an up-to-date picture of FreeMIS.

FreeMIS is working for me at North Berwick High School, providing the following functions: reporting to parents; positive referrals; progress tracking and target setting; unexpected absence notifications.

FreeMIS is easy to use once it has been set up, but it is a fairly technical job to get FreeMIS up and running on a web server, and there is not much documentation to help you.

As a bare minimum, you would need to know how to get a Ruby on Rails application running on a web server (FreeMIS runs on Rails 1.2.2), be familiar with MySQL and be able to use a tool like Phpmyadmin to populate pupil tables (as FreeMIS does not have a front end tool to enter new pupils other than by doing it one at a time!)

If you can manage that, you will find FreeMIS to be a great tool. Teachers at my school are very happy with it.

If you manage to get FreeMIS up and running, I would be very interested to hear from you.

I am not actively developing FreeMIS now. I make the occasional tweak to suit the needs of my school, but I have pretty much given up on the idea that it might ever provide a comprehensive alternative to the commercial MIS systems.

If you are looking for such an alternative, I suggest that you have a look at SchoolTool or ClaSS.

Stumble it!

I was rather shocked this evening when I realised that the last official release of FreeMIS was in June 2006!  This release has been downloaded over 3000 times, but I have done quite a bit of work on the application since then, so I really ought to put together a  more up-to-date package.

It’s now officially on my to-do list!  Anyone impatient for the latest code can always download it from the subversion repository

Stumble it!

Apologies to those of my readers who are not web developers – what follows may well make no sense to you whatsoever!

I am so please with myself! For nigh on a year now, I have been aware of a potential problem with FreeMIS (the Ruby-on-Rails based  management information system for schools that I have developed) and today I solved that problem.

The problem is that the printing of a full set of reports for all the pupils in a year group is a huge task, which can take Rails anything up to 130 seconds to complete. By the time it has done this, the browser and or web server have got bored and given up waiting. I have played around with the configuration of Apache and FastCGI, and tried using mongrel instead, but none managed to fix the problem 100%.

In PHP, it would be easily solved by purging the data produced out to the browser repeatedly through the task, but Rails does not have this option.

Last night as I was drifting off to sleep I realised that I could solve the problem by doing the reports one pupil at a time!

Obvious, you might think, but the system needs a “one-click” solution for printing all the reports for a register class – it would not be acceptable to require user input to print out each individual pupil’s reports.

What I realised last night was that if I did the printing of reports via Ajax and RJS, then I get exactly what I wanted.

I start by submitting a form via Ajax to print the reports for a register class.

The action renders the reports for the first pupil in the register class at the bottom of the relevant div, then puts a hidden variable into the form, with the id of the next pupil in the register class. It then tells the browser to “click” on the submit button of the form. All the reports for the register class then come out, pupil by pupil, and no individual browser<->server cycle lasts more than a couple of seconds, so no chance of timing out. I can even put a percentage progress bar at the top of the page. Happy happy joy joy

Stumble it!

The account hosting the FreeMIS demo site got hacked just after Christmas, and I stripped out all the sites I was hosting on that account until I worked out where the vulnerability was.  It turned out that the vulnerability was in a old Joomla extension, but I have not yet got around to switching the FreeMIS demo site back on. It’s on my list of things to do this weekend

Stumble it!

Someone asked me today “how famous do you think FreeMIS is?” – a question that was clearly going somewhere. I mumbled some non-comittal waffle, and was then presented with a copy of issue 65 of Linux User. There’s an article about this year’s FLOSSIE, which mentions my 5 minute slot about FreeMIS. At the risk of consuming too much of your precious bandwidth, allow me to reproduce my mention in its entirety:

Robert Jones' (sic) FreeMIS, developed with Ruby-on-Rails,
had come from a different direction - based on the need to
report to parents. As it is currently used in Scotland, it
uses Shibboleth for single sign-on. (c) R Smedley

Shibboleth SSO for FreeMIS is actually “in development”, but apart from that it’s all true
The article has a link to the demo site – this explains the recent spike in visits to the demo.

Stumble it!