Solving Moodle's edit mode clutter

Re: Update - 13th March 2012

by Stuart Lamour -
Number of replies: 10
Picture of Plugin developers

Hi All,

@sussex we implimented a solution to the editing clutter and removed the turn editing on.

Made a quick video demonstraiting it all, interested to know peoples thoughts? 

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In reply to Stuart Lamour

Re: Update - 13th March 2012

by Juho Viitasalo -

Awesome! smile

Did you do any changes to the core or is this all done on theme level?

In reply to Stuart Lamour

Re: Update - 13th March 2012

by Ishant Saxena -

Awesome  work Stuart Lamour,

How u did That....is there any plugin or theme which u developed for this.

again awesome...congrats Man

In reply to Stuart Lamour

Re: sussex's solution to the editing clutter

by Séverin Terrier -
Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Testers Picture of Translators

Really interesting smile

Another approach of the editing mode, with less information permanently shown...

How have you done that exactly ?

In reply to Stuart Lamour

Re: Update - 13th March 2012

by Mark Pearson -

Stuart,

I've been tracking what you guys at Sussex have been doing (and BTW, I used to live in Durrington, Sussex) with great interest. I think the whole Study Direct system has a pleasing and thoughtfully designed feel to it which is a credit to you designers. That said, I'm not sure how well individual parts would function outside the overall Study Direct system. For example, the 'Dashboard'  concept of separating the editing from display is, as you point out, well established elsewhere, but I find that experienced Moodle users lose patience when setting up a  Wordpress site with all the faffing about switching from Dashboard to display. In addition, by separating the display of Resources , Activities and the like from the display of the Course Outline you effectively lose context for the Course Outline display. So, for example,

screenshot of conventional course layout

 

In the above example if all the labels are edited separately it's difficult to tell where they fit with associated resources and activities.

On the other hand, I can well imagine that having  a user interface which instantiates such a clear and thoughtfully designed workflow your user base at Sussex must be very satisfied indeed.

Mark Pearson

In reply to Stuart Lamour

Re: Update - 13th March 2012

by Paul Nicholls -

Hi Stuart,

That looks fantastic (as does the entire site, from what we can see in the video - congrats).  As has already been asked, have you achieved this entirely in a theme, or does it require core customisations?  Do you have any plans to release this (whether it requires core changes or not) to the community, or to try to get it included in the core in the near future?

We're looking to finally move from 1.9 to 2.3 when it comes out, and the changes demoed in your video look like something that would be well worth us implementing for our rollout (assuming it doesn't by some miracle make it into 2.3) - I could probably manage to implement it myself, but I'd rather not reinvent the wheel (especially one that looks as good as yours) if you're willing to share wink

 

Cheers,
Paul

In reply to Stuart Lamour

Re: Update - 13th March 2012

by Darcy Christ -

Thanks for sharing. Your environment looks amazing.

I'm curious how the move icons work. Do you have drag and drop enabled for resources/activities? That seems awkward to enable that from within a drop down menu, although perhaps I can't picture it.

In reply to Stuart Lamour

Re: Update - 13th March 2012

by Stuart Lamour -
Picture of Plugin developers

The initial step is to get rid of the if $editing stuff and change it for has_capability to edit. 

That gets rid of the turn editing on, but leaves your tutors always viewing the rather messy & clutered moodle editing view - a problem this thread is all about trying to crack.

The desing pattern the video shows is how we went about trying to solve this clutter - itereative prototyping, testing with users, and refining based of their feedback, untill it worked for the users. It seems to improve their workflow.

Is this a design pattern people think would work for their users? 

In reply to Stuart Lamour

Re: Update - 13th March 2012

by Mark Ward -

Hi Stuart

I like that a lot, I think that's definitely the direction I would like to see Moodle move in over the next few versions. Very slick!

At what level are the modifications made for that? Are we looking at core code changes, a modification to the course layout, or is it all theme based?

In reply to Mark Ward

Re: Update - 13th March 2012

by Stuart Lamour -
Picture of Plugin developers

Changing if ($isediting) to if (has_capability('moodle/course:manageactivities', get_context_instance(CONTEXT_COURSE, $course->id))) has to be done in course/lib.php and some other core parts.

For the 'clutter' hiding, the clean way is to change make_editing_buttons (also core) - i put in a tracker about this  http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-31976

You could do this with js in a theme (grab the img src, remove the img, add a backround-image with img src as the url...).

The ajax editing part is pretty clean if your using something like backbone.js and have made the 'clutter' edits in core - not sure how nice it would be if your making those 'cluter' edits with js in the theme!

hope this makes sense and if anyone has any other ideas on how to do it, please share!

In reply to Stuart Lamour

Re: Update - 13th March 2012

by Mark Ward -

Makes sense, would be great to see something like this considered for integration in Moodle 2.4

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