I have a small development project about to get underway regarding glossary and am wondering if people would want this feature in core Moodle (2.0 or 2.1) so I thought I'd post here to see.
Basically the idea is, a global glossary search for teachers which they can use to find definitions in other courses on the site, that might be relevant to their own course (ie so they can copy/paste it).
The intention is, let's say you are working on a science course and you are about to write a glossary definition for 'photosynthesis', then you think, hang on, we've done loads of other courses, I bet somebody already wrote one. So you search across the whole site or across the Science category, you find one, you copy it, then just add a new glossary entry as usual, paste it in, and maybe tweak it a bit to be more relevant to your course.
So there would be a link from the glossary to a 'search across glossaries' page. You would then be able to choose to search all glossaries across all courses in (a) the current category, or (b) any parent category, or (c) the whole site.
- The search would just be on the glossary term (wildcards permitted, so you could search for 'photosy*' if you're lazy or if you think other teachers probably misspelt it), and not a full text search.
- Results would be shown as normal paged results 10 at a time or whatever, you could click on them to go to the glossary entry or just copy/paste it straight from the page if desired.
- There might be a button you could click next to a glossary entry to add it to your own glossary, this would just open up the glossary add form, with the text from the existing entry filled in, so you could edit it and hit save.
- I haven't figured out quite how permissions should work, but presumably it would only include results from glossaries you are allowed to actually see. The link itself would appear to anyone who's allowed to add entries in the current glossary.
--sam