Bright Cache Statistics

Bright caching statics are now exposed to the browser and viewable in the developer tools.  The Bright API cache is a new feature in PHP clients [Drupal, WordPress] that replaces duplicate API calls with recent cached responses.   This has improved page performance up to 200%, and we quietly rolled that out in October.   Now you can view any page’s cache statistics as well and see just how much time was saved.

Database Table Manager

PHP clients now include a database table manager, so if you’ve added Bright Sync to your account, your local database is kept up to date automatically.   Bright Sync is a Bright add-on that allows SCORM Cloud registration and course data to appear in your local database, with recency of under 1 minute!   No need for a separate reports server when the data is local.  Contact us to find out more about Bright Sync and all the neat possibilities.

Improved Documentation Site

The Bright Documentation Site got some fancy new features like:

  • breadcrumbing of help pages, so your position in the documentation hierarchy is always available.
  • glossary entries are available anywhere, including on category pages.
  • lots and lots of new and updated entries.

Overrides

Overrides in Bright are registration fields that permit an administrator to “override” the source data from SCORM Cloud.   There are a lot of operational reasons why that might be necessary, the most common one is a learner is stuck in a course and can’t proceed.

One complicated thing about overrides that when they are used, reports in Bright and SCORM Cloud no longer align.   New features this month around overrides are:

  • we’ve expanded the list of fields to 4, complete, success, completed at, and score.
  • we’ve standardized the naming.   The original SCORM Cloud fields are all available at “provider_”…
  • a new field is included on the registration record call bright_rules_applied, which lists the override rules applied to the registration.

New Completion Rules

While we are talking about overrides, we also rolled out two new completion rules:

  • use_best_launch_data, which indicates that the override data should be automatically populated with the best result of any launch.   Useful if your course resets completion on subsequent launches, but you want to “lock-in” the fact that your learner has already completed the course.
  • complete_registration_when_num_interactions_exceeds – for some types of surveys, the survey is complete once all the survey questions are completed, no matter what.

Default Launch Template for Course Products

When using Bright for WooCommerce, previously on a product an administrator needed to define how the course will render for each product.   This often meant that the SCORM Cloud Course GUID had to be listed in each product twice.   No more!   Set up a single default template for your entire shop.

Containers and Orchestration

A lot of Docker-based experimentation is going on in the Bright laboratories right now.   So 2015?   Maybe.   We’ve got such a nice deployment tool for Bright [Rover] that the need was never very pressing.   But since orchestration is on our mind, we’ve spun up an orchestrator for Rover called, ahem, the “Roarchestrator”?   For hosting customers, updates are 100% hands-off, although still run by an attentive and attending human.