Prerequisites

Textclouds needs a Moodle installation on Apache2 and PHP 5.1.3 or above.

In order to work properly, TextClouds needs two external applications to be installed on the server system:

  • pdftotext (commonly installed by default on almost all major linux distros)
  • unoconv (easily installable via repos in CentOS5/RHEL5 and Ubuntu, needs OpenOffice 3.0 installed, which will be installed by dependency)
  • native PHP zip extension

For better results add paths of executables inside PATH environment variable, or set paths in file soffice_config.php.

IMPORTANT!!!
You have to start manually OpenOffice in socket mode. To do this, type in terminal

soffice -headless -accept='socket,host=127.0.0.1,port=8100;urp;' -nofirststartwizard

You can change host and port, but remember to change them also in soffice_config.php

Installation

Simply copy "textclouds" folder inside the "Blocks" folder in Moodle directory, then you should log in as administrator and visit Notification link in the Site Administration panel.

Support for other languages

TextClouds currently supports 11 languages (Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish), 4 of these (English, German, Italian and Spanish) contains also the stemming engine (the linguistic analysis to get to the root form of a word, with stemming, words such as "fishing", "fished", "fish", and "fisher" are reduced to the root word, "fish").

Anyone can extend TextCloud to support other languages. Just refer to the README.txt file included in the installation for the instructions to add support to other languages.

We would be grateful if you would extend TextCloud to support other languages. Just send us the code and we will integrate it in upcoming versions of the software.