Moodle in English: Moodlerooms: To Use or Not to Use

Moodle Partners

Hi everyone,

I've been exploring the differences between Moodle 1.9 and 2.0 and, in that process, have come to view Moodlerooms as a viable alternative for managing my own upgrade.

I am hoping to hear your thoughts from the field on this Moodle partner. Any ancedotes on pricing would be particularly helpful...

Further, as someone who is a little frustrated with the, seemlingly, limited ability to influence the Moodle product roadmap, I am wondering if Moodlerooms clients have perspective on the ability to provide feedback, test features early (etc.) with Moodlerooms Joule.

Ultimately, I want cheap, incredibly stable hosting, but also prefer the ability to voice my concern about a lack of product focus in one area, or get the ball moving in another.

Any feedback?

Thanks!

John

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Hi Dear John

I have an some good experiences working with organizations outside of Moodle Partner, recently I engaged http://www.AtHomeEducation.com to cleanup my Moodle-site from a self-hosting environment to their hosting.

I hope that this helps.

Best regards, Pavel

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I realize I'm pretty late, but in our experience MoodleRooms will certainly give you freedom to test new features if you pay "code review" fees to have their people test the code. Even if you know 100% that it works, you still have to pay a fee for their coders to test it in their Joule environment. The problem I have with MRooms is that you don't get Moodle anymore, you get their hopped-up version called Joule, which embeds a bunch of features and options. You can voice your concerns til you're blue in the face to your customer service rep (we do), but action on those concerns is another story...

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Now there is a blackboard in the room, everything will be different: http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=199248.
;-(

So that the post is not too off topic, the "Hardware and performance" forum http://moodle.org/mod/forum/view.php?id=596 is the right place to discuss hosting providers. Please read the initial pointers in its intro before posting.

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Code review is essential in running a stable/secure platform. Code that 100% works, may still have big security holes that only a line-by-line code review will reveal. At Remote-Learner we find these when doing code review in add-ons that otherwise work fine, fairly often.

When we find security probelms in contributed code, we report the issues to the maintainer, and in many cases they fix the issues, hopefully this helps improve the overall quality of plug-ins. I would definitly suggest anyone running contributed add-ons on a production Moodle site have the add-ons reviewed by developer for security issues.

We do have a list of add-ons we have reviewed and approved here (this is by no means comprehensive, we add several every few weeks).

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Have you thought about contributing these review to the new plugins database, which has a slot for trusted reviews. It could even be a standard text like "This plugin has been reviewed by Remote Learner development staff, and we consider the teachnical and security qualities of the code to be sufficiently good that we install this plugin for our clients on request. See http://remote-learner.net/content/remote-learner-approved-moodle-modules for more details."

I think that falls on the right side of being a useful contribution, and not just spam.

Note sure if you would want to contribute reviews to plugins you 'reject'.

Oh, and where are the 2.1+ columns in that table? I hope your customers are getting the chance to use all the nice question types we built last year at the OU

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we're hoping to contribute like that too - Anthony has just given me access to add reviews... now I just need to find the time to add them!

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The problem with Moodlerooms isn't so much the REVIEW, it's the pricing structure for the review. If my institution wants a plugin that would benefit many customers, they charge my institution for the review. Once the code passes, everyone else gets it for free. We're actually looking at Remote Learner, and if you could provide any feedback on that review process, I'd appreciate it. We're tired of dropiing $1000 a pop, even for themes.

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Really late to the party, but don't forget that after the code review, you have to pay extra for that plugin annually

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