Maybe it is not the new file system per se, BUT ME, who is messing things up, because I didn't understand it correctly. So please help me.
We are talking about the SERVER FILES, as showed in my example above.
I uploaded several files, following your video. Thanks to the video I discovered how teachers can upload files into their PRIVATE FILES area.
But if I upload a file into the SERVER FILES area, Students can:
- see them
- use them to upload them e.g. into an assignment (which means this could be the solution the teachers already uploaded not knowing that this could be visible to students too!)
If this is all correct and no misunderstanding of mine, we can go further and think about practical solutions for my 10 Universities Moodle site https://moodle.fhnw.ch
The solutions to find are:
a) teams of teachers should be able to see each others files
a2) in a big site like ours, it should be possible to have folders/areas only accessible to those teams/schools/universities SEPARATELY and not for teachers/students of the whole site (SERVER FILES is a good idea, but of little use on a 17'000 user and more than 5'000 courses site)
a3) this was implicitly possible in Moodle 1.9 where only the teachers registered in one course could access the courses's file areas and noone else. And only the enrolled students could access the files published by the teachers via links to files or links to folders.
b) if one and the same file is uploaded/referenced/linked into resources/activities maybe in different versions like myDocument01.pdf and and at a later stage myDocument02.pdf, every teacher of the team should be able to see whether all the links/references have been updated or if there are reasons to leave one reference/link to the original myDocument01.pdf whilst in other courses/resources/activities the new reference to myDocument02.pdf is needed.
b2) if this is not VISIBLE, a team of teachers has to set up a complicated tracking notebook to know where/in which course/resource/activity they referenced which version of the file. This was implicitly given in Moodle 1.9 where you had to choose different file names if you wanted to link SEPARATELY and at the same time to different versions, and using the same file name meant simply to replace the file contents with the new one without having to renew the link.
c) there are other aspects at the OS' file system level:
c1) handling backup-zip-files has to be quick and IMMEDIATE (which means without going through the database and without going through the GUI, unless bulk-operation-scripts are integrated to move/delete backup-zip-files), e.g. when Moodle fills the data disk over night and you have to free it up in a hurry next morning (I experienced this at least 3 times since 2004, when the backup did not correctly rotate the zip-files)
c2) handling missed files has to be quick, like in Moodle 1.9 where I could restore missed files individually from my tapes. Now I would have to go through the GUI or the database to find out the hashed-dir and the hashed-filename and only then I would be able to restore it from tape, assuming no other file got the same hashed-dir and hashed-filename in the meantime. Because teachers often contact me one year after they gave their course, if they repeat courses on a one year term. So they tell me they miss something and I simply restore the old backup-zip-file or any other file from tape, restore the course into a new course and finally we can partially merge back into the original course what is missing, or we decide to delete the original and keep the restored course. All this was very very handy and practical on Moodle 1.9
So, if the new file system doesn't offer such handy solutions any more, this means I have to find solutions first and I have to instruct my teachers to use new tricks.
As Derek says, Moodle is no CMS, so why didn't we keep the new file system lean an clean as it was in Moodle 1.9 ? Some security-enhancements would have done it.
Rosario