Moodle in English: New 1.8.2 HSU Forum Enhancements

New 1.8.2 HSU Forum Enhancements

Here is a preview of some new Forum Enhancements from Humboldt State University. This project includes enhancements in the following areas:

1. Navigation - Sequential View of posts
2. Subscribe to a thread/topic
3. Allow Anonymous forums
4. Sort posts in order by name or topic creation date
5. Expand/Collapse discussion topic display

We'd appreciate your comments on this project. A significant portion of the design, development, quality assurance and documentation was completed by our student development and support team.

Documentation and installation files are available at:
http://iss-tech.humboldt.edu/mellon/forum

This work is being released under GPL license and was completed with the support of a Mellon Award for Technology Collaboration.

Project Contributors included:
Sam Chaffee
Ray Thompson
Phillip Jensen
Allisun O'Connell
Jon Skulski
Colin Leslie
Jason Hardin
Dr. Kathy Munoz
Joan Van Duzer
Bill Evans

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Re: New 1.8.2 HSU Forum Enhancements

by James Phillips - Tuesday, 26 February 2008, 10:41 AM

This sounds great! I have been desperate for something like this for ages.
Just one question. Is it possible for a user to post as "anonymous" on an existing forum so that you then end up with a mix of people who don't mind if their identity is revealed and people that wish to hide their identity?

Will give this a run through and keep you posted with any issues I may encounter.

Best regards,

James Phillips

http://www.horsefrog.com

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User can Reveal?

by Chris Stones - Thursday, 28 February 2008, 2:54 AM

Well, as soon as you set the existing forum to anonymous everyone in that forum will be anonymous. And only instructors can reveal themselves on the post. Due to the fact 'User can Reveal' was not its own permission. The new forum can't yet allow any user to choose to reveal or not. ....But that's certainly something to look into now I suppose.

Chris B Stones

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Re: New 1.8.2 HSU Forum Enhancements

by Helen Foster - Tuesday, 26 February 2008, 8:28 PM

Hi Bill,

Thanks a lot for your forum enhancements work. I'm in agreement with James - it sounds great! approve

In order for people to easily find your forum enhancements, please could you add it to the modules and plugins database. Please could you also consider adding an "improvement" issue in the tracker, so that the forum enhancements may be considered for inclusion in core. If you post the tracker report number in this discussion, others will be able to watch/vote for/comment on it.

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Re: New 1.8.2 HSU Forum Enhancements

by Anthony Borrow - Wednesday, 27 February 2008, 1:15 AM

Bill - I think it would also be great if you would consider putting the code in Moodle's CVS. Let me know if you are interested and we can get that taken care of. Then folks could use the tracker to report any bugs, make feature requests, etc. Peace - Anthony

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Re: New 1.8.2 HSU Forum Enhancements

by Jon Skulski - Wednesday, 27 February 2008, 2:56 AM

Hi All,

I developed on the HSU Forum Enhancements Bill posted. I went ahead and

I created a tracker issue in contrib located at:

http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/CONTRIB-308

I added the enhancements to the Modules and Plugin directory:

http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/CONTRIB-308

And I contacted Anthony about adding to CVS.

Thanks for all your replies. We're very proud of this product and are glad to present it the community.

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Re: New 1.8.2 HSU Forum Enhancements

by Anthony Borrow - Wednesday, 27 February 2008, 5:42 AM

John - Thanks for your work on the HSU Forum Enhancement patch. I think the URL for the Modules and Plugins directory is:

http://moodle.org/mod/data/view.php?d=13&rid=1174

I updated some of the information and approved the database entry so that others should be able to see it now. The files have been uploaded to CVS so I have changed the status of CONTRIB-308 to resolved. After 24 hours, you may want to update the download location to begin using download.moodle.org. We have to wait for the initial zip file to be created as that takes place every evening. It is great to be able to collaborate with such talented and generous folks. Let me know if there is anything I can do to support you efforts. Peace - Anthony

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Re: New 1.8.2 HSU Forum Enhancements

by Bernhard Hiegl - Wednesday, 27 February 2008, 6:01 AM

Bill, this looks like a fantastic enhancement. Just for your information: tried it with the latest 1.9 but after upgrading the database successfully the admin page is unavailable. It shows up blank.

Thanks, Bernhard

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Re: New 1.8.2 HSU Forum Enhancements

by Anthony Borrow - Wednesday, 27 February 2008, 7:46 AM

Bill - I would discourage folks from applying the patch intended for 1.8 to 1.9. There have been significant changes and improvements to the 1.9 code. I think ultimately, if we want these enhancements for 1.9 that we will need to merge them with the 19STABLE branch. I'm not sure if Bill wants or is able to do this at this point. If someone wants to take it on, they can upload a zip or set of diffs to CONTRIB-308. Peace - Anthony

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Re: New 1.8.2 HSU Forum Enhancements

by Julian Ridden - Wednesday, 27 February 2008, 5:29 PM

not sure if we should merge this with Stable..It is a considerably large change to how forums operate. I must admit, from what I have seen, it is a change for the better.

Like the Quiz changes, the community should be given a chance to experiment and debate the changes before such a large change is made to the user experience.

I hope to try this on my 1.9 demo site soon. It does look fantastic and makes, especially large forums, alot easier to manage.

Great work.

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Re: New 1.8.2 HSU Forum Enhancements

by Anthony Borrow - Thursday, 28 February 2008, 4:13 AM

Julian - Just to clarify, when I use the word stable I am not referring to core. The HSUForum code is a patch in CONTRIB which is to be used precisely as you indicated - to help the community experiment with and comment on the patch. As for versions of the patch, there is a development version (HEAD) and a 18STABLE version which indicates that it is to patch the 18STABLE version of Moodle core code. My comment intended to raise the question of whether Jon wants to work on having a 19STABLE version of the patch that would be intended to patch or overwrite Moodle core 1.9 code on an individual's installation. As I understand the patch, it is intended to be used with Moodle 1.8 (not 1.9). There have been major changes to the forums in 1.9 that are not being backported (for example, the ability to choose the aggregation type of ratings), performance optimizations, etc. Of course folks are welcome to experiment and apply the patch to 1.9 and see what issues might arise; however, they will not have the benefit of the 1.9 forum enhancements that were made in core (19STABLE). In summary, I am not advocating that the HSU forum enhancements be included in Moodle core although the community after experimenting with them may advocate for that by filing a feature request in the Tracker. I am hoping that a branch of the HSU forum enhancements gets developed (either in HEAD or 19STABLE) that is intended to work with Moodle 1.9. I know this can get confusing so let me know if I have muddied the waters. Peace - Anthony

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Re: New 1.8.2 HSU Forum Enhancements

by Julian Ridden - Thursday, 28 February 2008, 11:33 AM

Ahhhhhh, gotchya.

Did get a little scared though for a second.

Ill keep an eye out for a 1.9 patch in contrib

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Re: New 1.8.2 HSU Forum Enhancements

by Anthony Borrow - Thursday, 28 February 2008, 12:56 PM

Julian - No problem. I know that the language gets a bit technical and can easily be confused. I appreciated the opportunity to slow down and be a little more clear. If it was confusing or misleading to you, I'm sure it would have misled others. Peace - Anthony

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Re: New 1.8.2 HSU Forum Enhancements

by James Phillips - Wednesday, 5 March 2008, 9:28 PM

I just tried this on 1.9. It seems fine.

Cheers,

James

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Re: New 1.8.2 HSU Forum Enhancements

by Jon Skulski - Tuesday, 11 March 2008, 2:35 AM

James,

Thanks for trying this on 1.9. We've had similar results but since we are releasing a patch that overwrites complete files (with modified 1.8.2+), it's not correct to say that it works with 1.9

In the future we hope to release a 1.9 (and maybe a 2.0!) patch.

Thanks!
Jon

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Re: New 1.8.2 HSU Forum Enhancements

by Matt Gibson - Tuesday, 11 March 2008, 8:35 AM

This all sounds awesome - some of these changes I've been waiting for since I can't remember. Can't wait to try it on 1.9!

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Re: New 1.8.2 HSU Forum Enhancements

by Jon Skulski - Thursday, 28 February 2008, 2:42 AM

To add to the list of contributors:

Chris Stones developed the Anonymous Forums.

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I worked on Mellon Too

by Chris Stones - Thursday, 28 February 2008, 2:43 AM

Hey Chris Stones here. I worked on that Mellon Project too! But my name isn't there! Ouch. I was the fellow behind the anonymous forums so I'm both excited and nervous to find out how it goes for people. If you would like to contact me elsewhere you can visit welcometochrisworld.com

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Re: New 1.8.2 HSU Forum Enhancements

by Ray H - Wednesday, 12 March 2008, 10:06 AM

This looks great!

I know you guys used Moodle 1.8.2, but hopefully it will work on our Moodle 1.8 + build!

Thanks!

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Re: New 1.8.2 HSU Forum Enhancements

by Ray H - Friday, 28 March 2008, 9:38 AM

Hey guys... just tested this on our development box.

Everything works quite well!
We are using Moodle 1.8+, so it isn't quite up to par with 1.8.2.

Hence, there are some issues to be worked out...

1) Enabling Forum View to "Expandable" messes up our Moodle front page or any other forum that is set to "Social Forum".

This is a deal breaker for me! Or I could probably just not implement the userlib patch.

Before:

After:

2) When Forum View is "Expandable" in a regular forum, the columns do not align correctly.

EDIT: just found out that the Yahoo TreeView widget is the main culprit behind the columns not being equal... one way to fix this is to make the width of the replies column larger in the widget.... i haven't successfully figured this out yet... but i'll let you know if i do!

3) Forum singular thread subscription only works when forum subscription is off. Is this done by design?

Thanks for reading!
Hopefully somebody can help me out.

-Ray

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Re: New 1.8.2 HSU Forum Enhancements

by Neil Birt - Tuesday, 15 April 2008, 7:06 AM

Any updates to this for 1.9?

I have tried it with 1.9 and while it is functional, there do appear to be some small issues. For example, the thread subscribe/unsubscribe doesn't work.

Thanks

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Re: New 1.8.2 HSU Forum Enhancements

by James Phillips - Wednesday, 16 April 2008, 5:58 PM

Neil,
You're name rings lots of bells for some reason. Did you used to live in Tokyo?
James

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Re: New 1.8.2 HSU Forum Enhancements

by Neil Birt - Friday, 18 April 2008, 12:00 AM

Actually I was in Nagoya and Tottori. I was in Japan for about 15 years all told.

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Re: New 1.8.2 HSU Forum Enhancements

by Neil Birt - Wednesday, 23 April 2008, 3:23 AM

I have fixed two issues with the HSU forum enhancements in 1.9:

discussion subscriptions - this wasn't working right as the database table was not automatically set up when the enhancement was loaded. I fixed this by setting up the table manually. There still appear to be some issues in XMLDB though.
user profiles - the editlib.php file was breaking the ability to modify user profiles. Turns out it was missing the useredit_update_interests function from 1.9. This has been added in the attached file and it seems to work.

Other than that things seem fine and many of my users are quite happy with the improvements.

editlib.php

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Re: New 1.8.2 HSU Forum Enhancements

by Ray H - Wednesday, 23 April 2008, 7:28 AM

Hi Neil,

Did you encounter any of the problems I listed a couple of posts above?
Specifically issues #1 and #3?

-Ray

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Re: New 1.8.2 HSU Forum Enhancements

by Neil Birt - Wednesday, 23 April 2008, 10:09 AM

Hi Ray

I haven't run into those problems as we don't use forums in that way. However, I did test out the social forum format and I did get a fatal error out of the format.php for that format. I can't even get the page to entirely display.

Your other problem I am unable to replicate.

I'll let you know if I work out the fatal error.

Neil

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Re: New 1.8.2 HSU Forum Enhancements

by Michael O'Brien - Thursday, 2 October 2008, 11:01 PM

Error encountered when installing HSU forum in moodle 1.9.2+ (Build 20081001)
When I tried to install the forum I got the following error.

Version mismatch: block recent_activity can't downgrade 2007101509 -> 2004042900!

Anyone able to help get me back on the road?

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Re: New 1.8.2 HSU Forum Enhancements

by Neil Birt - Friday, 3 October 2008, 6:01 AM

Hi Michael

One thing you can do is go into your MySQL database and change the version number in the block table. Change 2007101509 to 2004042800 for instance.

However, I would really recommend against at this point. I really like the HSU enhancements and hope to be able to add them in some day. I did get them to work with a 1.9 beta version and they were great.

However, there appears to be some significant changes to the forum code in 1.9.2 and this is no longer the case. I believe that even if you modify the version number so that this is no longer an issue you will encounter a host of other issues that will prevent your forums from working properly.

The enhancements will have to wait until someone has the time to update the code accordingly

Neil

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Re: New 1.8.2 HSU Forum Enhancements

by James Phillips - Thursday, 9 October 2008, 4:06 PM

I am currently using this hack for an anonymous forum. However, the forum postings appear as anonymous but are sent out with the persons name on, which kind of defeats the object. Is this project still alive?

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Re: New 1.8.2 HSU Forum Enhancements

by Tim Noakes - Wednesday, 16 September 2009, 4:31 PM

I am Tim and am a Novice Admin of our now Moodle 1.9.5+ site (hosted elsewhere). And am trying to get HSU forum to work so users can post Anonymous posts.

Any Ideas of how to get working in 1.9.5+ ?

Help would be very much appreciated

PS The Documentation refers to Moodle 1.8

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