General developer forum

Re: Upgrade path 1.9 -> 2.2

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 10:51:52 GMT

by Anne Krijger.

Hi Visvanath.

You DID anwser my question by point to the discussion here;
http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=195460#p853817

Tim's anwser to your question in that thread;

" 'You can upgrade to Moodle 2.2 from ... 1.9' That is clear. It is also correct."

is exactly what I wanted to know.

You indeed had already asked this question and had it anwsered by Tim.
I was just explaining why I hadn't found your question and Tim's anwser while looking for it.

Anne.

Re: SCORM 2004 - progress?

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 10:44:11 GMT

by Anne Krijger.

Hi Dan,

Sorry, what I meant with (lack of my) overview is that I can't tell from the tracker issue how much time is guesstimated to be needed to complete all the subtasks.

I was asked last week how much time, AKA money, it would cost to make Moodle SCORM 2004 3rd Rev complient.
All I could find was a comment in your blog on looking for funding and guessing it would be somewhere between 6 to 8 months. I also saw that some work had been done setting up the test framework, but it wasn't clear if this was part of the 6 to 8 months or additional time spend. I tried to figure that out by looking at the tracker issue but that didn't provide that information.

Assuming there is still 6 to 8 months work left that would mean it would cost about 100k Euro's. My guess is that is to steep to get the funding from this particular client for.

Anne.

Re: Useful user statistics?

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 09:12:08 GMT

by Ivn Vai.

@Stuart

Ahh yes I did have a look at both of those links and have seen them earlier too. And as you said some of them have slight some errors and well some of them have got too much of information which I dont need based on the data I require.

It would be great if you could list out like which of them work and which of them don't. And even I am going to start creating them and will keep this topic updated with my replies and any queries I make and complete successfully.

However my queries might have an extra element in them, because I have created a little hierarchy system by creating my own module and have put my users into those hierarchies first before they access any courses or learning resources/activities.

But for now, as much as I know, I'll give it a go and yes hopefully looking forward to some more discussions and suggestions from the experts here.

Thanks n Good luck with ur queries. Look forward to a reply from you soon..

Re: Moodle end of life 1.9 plans

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 08:06:25 GMT

by Matt Bury.

Mike,

Good point about reputation. There's also the danger of Moodle HQ being perceived as "riding roughshod" over its user base.

Has anyone taken any polls or done any surveys on the subject? Moodle HQ certainly has the means and the expertise at its disposal (I'm sure there are some expert poll designers around who could make it fair and balanced) to do a well designed, transparently run poll of the majority of users' points of view over the subject.

How about a little democracy?

Re: Any word on ForumNG thinking, like including in core 2+?

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 07:52:15 GMT

by Ger Tielemans.

The first time I saw FOSS it was D3E: http://d3e.sourceforge.net/

I still like the concept of a window with two frames:
- on the left the document/website/animation for the discussion
- on the right the forum about the content in the left frame.
- I even had a prototype on CD for the moodle 1.4.6, but that got lost in the plane to Australia

Since that day I like this concept of having all what you need for your task in one screen together. (In the handbook for multimedia form Meyer - Cambridge Press- you find support for this approach: You can lower the workload for the student on a task by removing the navigation issues from the core task.

On this moment I have three versions of my wish:

1. I still like the old D3E/Ubiquitus: the resource on the left, the connected forum on the right. (in the Royal version there is a paragraph conncetion between left and right, but this time the links initiated by the forum user.)

2.When I want to discuss a timeline like the one from MIT, I can connect (dynamicly) the pages of a moodle wiki to that timeline, but it would be easier to have here also a window with two frames, but now a frame with the timeline on top and the discussion in the bottom frame. (Again: In the Royal version the student can connect timeline instances to threads of the forum below: a variation on this one: having a movie with a timeline at the top and the student can mark spots on the timeline and attach a comment in the forum below)

3. My last wish is for the forum off topic: I wish to have a kind of meta-module in moodle where I can select a two frame window and then choose the resource in the left frame and the activity in the right frame.. (or top/bottom)

Was signed,
The Dreamer

Re: New to Moodle, activity locking and certificates

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 07:48:24 GMT

by Matt Bury.

Hi Mark,

Tracking the time that learners have spent on activities is notoriously difficult. There are so many factors that can affect the reported time on the server and so many ways to cheat the system, i.e. open a page, have a quick break, come back, open the next page, etc.

You can only get a rough idea of how long learners have spent online from the Moodle activity logs.

Other strategies are:

giving estimated times to successfully complete an activity
placing some kind of timer applet in the pages which check for mouse and/or keyboard activity and report active usage times to the server accordingly
making courses results rather than time based, i.e. if you can successfully complete the activities, it doesn't matter how long it took you. (Different learners take different lengths of time anyway).

Personally, I'd go for the last option but that requires some solid expertise on testing and assessment and knowing how to make assessments valid and accurate.

I hope this helps!

Re: adding a logo to my moodle site

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 07:25:39 GMT

by Colin Fraser.

That is the usual thing, but...haha! Next, does your theme already have an image in the logo position? If it does not, then it is possible that logos are not supported - which means that you may have to change themes. Which theme are you modifying anyway?

Themes in Moodle 2 are very different, so you may have to learn a lot more about them than you had previously thought. You might start here, with the Dev:Themes pages... That will provide you with far more accurate information than I could give.

Make Email Address Un-editable

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 06:37:47 GMT

by sweet escape.

How do i make the email address in the profile section un-editable for a certain role?

Re: Adding a user title to the fullnamedisplay

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 05:43:17 GMT

by Darcy Christ.

I spoke too quickly. This only changes the "You are logged in as" string, but no where else.

Clearly, there must be a better place to perform this kind of customization.

Re: Adding a user title to the fullnamedisplay

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 05:09:16 GMT

by Darcy Christ.

well, i found a way to do it, but it ain't pretty.

I added this to the bottom of my theme's config file:

global $USER;
$USER->englishname = $USER->profile['englishname'];

I'm really hoping someone with more experience can help me to find a better place to put this code.

Re: Adding a user title to the fullnamedisplay

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 05:00:27 GMT

by Darcy Christ.

Looking to revive an old thread...

I'm hoping to add a custom profile field to the display name. Seems straight forward enough.

We have a real requirement to support 'english' names at our university, where most of the students are chinese but often go by their english names. The first and last names are fixed due to school policy (which makes sense), but the real need to expose an additional name is extremely important.

I've determined that the Chinese language pack is able to reverse first and last name (as is custom here) by setting the $string['fullnamedisplay'] in moodle.php in the lang pack. When I saw this, I was hopeful that it would be easy to define a custom profile field and then simply reference it:

$string['fullnamedisplay'] = '{$a->firstname} {$a->lastname} {$a->profile[\'englishname\']} ';

Unfortunately, get_strings() does not support access to the profile array.

So before I try to fix this..

1) am I missing another way to achieve what I want to do?

2) is it better to try to change the way get_string() handles string interpolation or else find a way to set $a->profile['englishname'] to the accessible property of $a->englishname? And if so, anyone know where to do this in a non-core-code-changing way?

Re: New to Moodle, activity locking and certificates

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 04:55:06 GMT

by Sandra King.

Hello, You might run a search on Greg Smith, he has written a modification to the code (hack) that worked up until 1.9+ he may have something for 2.0 -- I will be looking for it too.

Good luck,

Sandra

Re: Moodle and GOOGLE+

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 04:07:07 GMT

by John Andrewartha.

Iframe works with any activity or block (HTML Block) that you can edit or create.

This link gives you the command structure and some additional information.

http://docs.moodle.org/22/en/Iframe

You edit your page by switching to html mode in the editor.

Things to keep in mind.

Make sure you have trusted user enabled, or your work will be sanitized. This allows teachers and above to edit page code direct. Make sure you are a teacher, manager, course creator of admin.

To put G+ in a side block add the HTML block and edit. Insert the iframe and it should work.

If as a start you also embed your web pages in the topic or week you can do read and real time chat in one screen, and not leave the course area.

This does not integrate the G+ in moodle but it is a starting point.

John

Re: Developing a project using Moodle as a Framework - Advise Please!! :)

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 02:38:04 GMT

by Mark Nelson.

Hi Seamus,

If you are starting from scratch I don't see why you wouldn't start with Moodle 2.2. Regarding WAMP or XAMPP, there is no real performance difference afaik. XAMMP is multi platform and WAMP is for windows.

Adding new tables to Moodle is done via an install.xml file in the db folder for each module, you can also define relationships (such as foreign keys). I suggest looking in the current mod directory, and viewing the code for any existing modules and trying to understand how it all works from there. You can also view http://dev.moodle.org/course/view.php?id=2 for more information.

Re: Moodle and GOOGLE+

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 01:57:50 GMT

by Manuel Stroh.

Thank you very much John for your reply. I think that might work. Anyway, can you please guide me through the process of creating an embedded iFrame? Or some tutorial or something, I haven't found anything yet

Re: Moodle and GOOGLE+

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 00:51:28 GMT

by John Andrewartha.

There is an Authentication module that handles Google it may be what you want.

If the user is authenticated using Google then a embedded link in the html block should/ might work.

Here is the link http://moodle.org/plugins/view.php?plugin=auth_googleoauth2

Re: Moodle end of life 1.9 plans

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 00:47:19 GMT

by Mike Smith.

Thanks Derek for those links. I'll monitor those. I take your point about voting.

Cheers, Mike

Re: Moodle end of life 1.9 plans

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 00:45:47 GMT

by Mike Smith.

Spot on Mat.

They might even be considered different products purely based on M1.9 being suitable for the role you describe. That would be a broad base of users indeed - perhaps more so given the likely number of unregistered installations (in my case of the five or so Moodles I run for myself and clients I've only bothered registering just the one).

I've been an advocate to my clients of Moodle as an LMS on the basis of low support requirements (indeed low total cost of ownership) until their user base grows to large numbers. For many small businesses their mature users base would always be in the dozens, not hundreds let alone thousands. But there are many, many small businesses and organisations in this cohort. They can't afford IT development after commisioning of a new web application like an LMS, they need something low risk that works predictably out of the box. Known weakness are more manageable than unknown features.

Dropping M1.9 support altogether seems to be tied to the notion that take-up of M2.x would be hastened, thereby allowing the development effort to focus on just the one version. Obviously resources are limited, but M1.9's functional core could be frozen and it would really only need security fixes from Moodle HQ. Surely that can't be an unsurmountable challenge.

Throw out 1.6 to 1.8 by all means. They are the equivalents of IE6 if we want to run analogies. A better analogy would be that M1.9 is like Windows XP - mature, reliable, low resource needs, well-understood and therefore low risk. Yes it has bugs and shortcomings, but they are known and manageable.

Let M2.0 attract new users on its own merits in terms of better functionality. I'll happliy migrate on that argument and take my clients along, but please don't force me and thousands of other loyal Moodlers to upgrade simply because of security patches ending for M1.9. I suspect many won't do it if they risk degraded functionality or higher risk - and then you'll have Moodle's name being tarnished as an increasingly leaky web application.

Moodle and GOOGLE+

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 22:49:17 GMT

by Manuel Stroh.

Hello all,

First of all, I am new to Moodle and as far as I've seen its an amazing tool. I've been asked to add a block wich will link the current user to his Google+ profile, but it should dispaly it inside an iFrame. I've already created the block and it has the Google+ profile button, but still I don't have idea how to display the user's profile inside an iFrame. Should I create a page? Where?

Thank you very much, your help is very appreciated

Re: Upgrade path 1.9 -> 2.2

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 21:59:00 GMT

by Visvanath Ratnaweera.

Hi Anne

Sorry, if I answered the wrong question. From what I can see,
- I brought up the same ambiguities you mentioned in your original post here http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=195460#p853817.

- In his reply Tim Hunt, a core developer, confirmed that a one step upgrade from 1.9 to 2.2 is supported http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=195460#p853866.

- In my reply to I gave the link to where the topic was forwareded, namely to this http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=193518#p843398 one in the Documentation forum.

Is it different from what you've asked? Don't let the subject distract you, the netiquette generation is dead.

About moving the thread, no, I don't have the administrative rights to do that!