I have done a bunch of updates to Tsugi’s support for stand alone App Stores (without any kind of lesson content). This is all in production at www.tsugicloud.org

I have expanded the contract in register.php for the tools to describe themselves and improved the pattern in .htaccess / tsugi.php to better support the App Store. You can see this all in action at:

https://www.tsugicloud.org/tsugi/store/details/peer-grade

Play with “Test” and “Tool URLs”. A much smoother flow and richer experience.

You can see the new patterns for developers to take advantage of this in a relatively simple tool like:

https://github.com/tsugitools/map

Look at .htaccess / tsugi.php / register.php and the store folder which holds screen shots. Some notes:

– The new and expanded register.php is what drives the pretty store view under /tsugi/store

– The new tsugi.php makes it so every tool has a Canvas configuration URL and can dump its own configuration in JSON (more to come here):

https://www.tsugicloud.org/mod/map/register.json
https://www.tsugicloud.org/mod/map/canvas-config.xml

– There are new options in tsugi/config.php to include a privacy url and service level agreement url:

$CFG->privacy_url = 'https://www.tsugicloud.org/services/policies/privacy';
$CFG->sla_url = 'https://www.tsugicloud.org/services/policies/service-level-agreement';

These are important when connecting to Google Classroom so you should have them for your sites. Don’t point to mine – make your own and be honest and thorough.

And while I am on the topic – you might want to take a minute and play with Google Classroom. It is easiest to use a non-enterprise Google account. Some enterprises (like umich.edu) do not let their users use Google Classroom. But my @gmail.com account works fine.

Log in to classroom.google.com and make a course. Then go to

https://www.tsugicloud.org/tsugi/settings/

And connect to Google Classroom. All of a sudden little green squares show up to let you push tools into Google. Grades flow and everything. Google Classroom flow is pretty nice – but like any proprietary integration – to make it work on the Tool Provider side requires special tooling.

So in summary, if you are a Tsugi tool developer, you might want to up your game in register.php, tsugi.php (adding .htaccess if you don’t already have it) and adding some screen shots in a store folder. The App Store falls back nicely with a simpler view until you upgrade your tool to feed the necessary metadata to expanded store.

Hope you like it and comments welcome.