5 things you (perhaps) don’t know about eFront

Through time eFront has become extra feature rich. However, any added functionality comes with an increased level of complexity as well; a complexity that can hide a function in favor of another. Here is a short list of things well-hidden inside eFront that you probably don’t know or you don’t use.

1) You can issue commands directly from the search box

Many people don’t know that you can use the search box to issue commands for e.g., editing a user or changing a lesson. So, if you want a fast way to move around the interface give them a try. For more info check the related wiki article:
http://docs.efrontlearning.net/index.php/Quick_commands

2) You can create tests with qualitative characteristics

A very strong feature of eFront is the ability to create pools of questions and combine them to tests. Although you can create tests by selecting questions one-by-one eFront offers a very powerful engine for building tests with qualitative characteristics. For example you can create a test with a “duration around 10 minutes and around 20 questions”. eFront will try to optimize the questions used to match these restrictions. For more info and additional options on this tool check:
http://docs.efrontlearning.net/index.php/Tests#Adjust_questions

3) You can integrate eFront with Facebook, WordPress, Joomla, LDAP or Amember

Either through our Social layer, or through the help of our users community, eFront can be integrated with a variety of other systems. Here is a few links to a integrations specifics:

Facebook – http://docs.efrontlearning.net/index.php/Social_extensions#Facebook_integration
Amember – http://amember.com/forum/showthread.php?t=8632
Joomla – http://www.jfusion.org/forums/viewforum.php?f=53&sid;=3f6dfa1b1af6ed93d20d49fd595dec39
Wordpress – http://www.computersolutions.cn/blog/2010/09/efrontwpi-wordpress-integration-plugin-for-efront/
LDAP – http://docs.efrontlearning.net/index.php/LDAP_support

4) You can extend eFront in various ways through modules. Some of them are already installed in your system!

All versions of eFront come with a few pre-installed but *NOT* activated modules. You can activate them from the admin interface. Note that through modules you can extend eFront in significant ways by adding Blogs, Wikis, Youtube videos, F.A.Q, Announcements board, Garedebooks, Journals, Workbooks and more. For a list of officially supported modules check:
http://www.efrontlearning.net/download/modules.html

5) You can use distant themes to speed-up your sites!

Are you a performance junky? If yes, then eFront offers an important facility that can speed up your site: the ability to serve an eFront theme from a distant server.
To make use of this functionality you simply have to do the following:
a) Upload your theme in a distant server. A good solution is to use Amazon’s S3 service. There is info on aws.amazon.com on how to do that. As a hint I would suggest to download and use S3Fox, a firefox plugin that allows you to upload files to an S3 bucket from within Firefox.

A typical S3Fox screenb) Go to admin->themes->upload theme. Do not browse for a theme but give the direct URL to the theme’s XML
That was it!

Note: Combining S3 with Amazon’s CloudFront can give you even bigger speed boost since your theme content will be served from a server near your user. For more info check: http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/