Courses and course formats

Dear Steve,

It is entirely possible to put some additional logic into format.php such that weeks 1, 3 & 7 open automatically - but that would be for all users and all courses that use Collapsed Weeks, unless you wished to test for specific course id / user id's.  But the further you go, the less flexible and longer updates take when things change.

The Java and COBOL examples are just for fun ;) - I started programming in Basic and COBOL was the second language I learnt at College.  My current favourite is Java and spend most of my time coding in it.

Cheers,

Gareth

Dear Frankie,

Apology accepted, please give me time to read through your correction.  Please do not tell Moodle news yet as needs to be finalised - screen shot is an example of what can be done - needs a bit of work to make it user friendly - the hard bit ;).

Cheers,

Gareth

Dear Frankie,

In essence, no, because they do not exist within the distrubuted code.

There needs to be a well thought out mechanism for facilitating the activation of this specific customisation of the Collapsed Weeks format whilst at the same time being efficient in the way the code is executed at both the client and server ends as to not be of detriment to performance. The change should also not magnify my workload in terms of maintence.

I believe that your desired change whist good is a specific way of presenting a course that should be up to the user to choose if they so desire.  The current existing distribution is simple and elegant.

The change I illustrated in my previous post within this thread was with respect a mechanism to illustrate to you how the change could be applied without fully reinventing the wheel as you had done.  After all, why climb a mountain when you only need to stand on a chair?

The change itself needs to be applied five times in the first instance and tested on as many browsers as possible.  This takes time and needs to be performed from an engineering point of view.  I have often demonstrated a work in progress only to find afterwards that the sales person has then promised to have it delivered to the customer the next day when in reality it was six months away from being in such a state.  The same is true here, it must be done right and carefully thought out to determine the correct method of implementing the functionality upon the existing functionality.

In writing these words I believe that as there are more demands for variations on the presentation and the current mechanism of editing 'format.php' to achieve this would become overloaded and confusing that the solution to this would be an additional course setting in the database customised through the course settings form.  I currently do not know how to do this, although I believe other formats do and so could be used as examples in understanding how to.

Regards,

Gareth

Now that Creative Commons has evolved would it be a better licence for Moodle as a whole?

No.

There are important differences between text and media, like an FAQ, photo or video, which is appropriately licensed under CC, and computer code, which is better licensed using something like the GPL.

I think this FAQ covers it quite well: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#WhyNotGPLForManuals