I've been tasked with adding some features to the google docs repository that meet specific needs for our site. The changes are summarized below and I'd like to know if these would be welcome upstream:
- Include collection support (basically folders) in the repository
- Allow links to documents, rather than just copying documents to moodle. A link points to the html version of a published document. The repository does the publishing automatically when a link is created.
- Switch to OAUTH authentication so that the warning about untrusted sites isn't displayed to users. Also, OAUTH is recommended by google. (Signed AuthSub would also get rid of the warnings, but google seems to be moving away from that)
- Allow specification of a hosted domain, so that it's easy to login to e.g. @yourschool.edu hosted accounts
- Show the google account that's in use in file picker. Otherwise it can be confusing with multiple accounts, as people may have both a personal and a hosted account.
- Allow other types of content (images, user content, etc)
These changes are implemented right now as a proof of concept, and I'd like to know if any or all of them would be welcomed into the moodle base code. I found the moodle googleapi.php and liboauth.php to be a little simplistic, and chose to use the Zend/Gdata, and Zend/Oauth stuff instead, as switching from AuthSub to OAUTH meant rewriting googleapi.php anyways. The code could be reimplemented using custom classes if need be, although I think the Zend/Gdata stuff is self-contained enough to be a useful addition and is actually in 2.1, although unused. Zend/Oauth would have to be added. lib/zend has a note contained in it not to use the libraries outside /webservices/, so I'm a little unsure.
Anyways, any thoughts on these features? I've attached a screenshot showing the collection support.
-matt