Hi Derek,
Apologies for the delay in my reply. I've had a very busy few months and some of my forum subscriptions have fallen behind.
Regarding your first question, I was really hoping to get some Forum changes in for Moodle 3.0. I have been actively working on User Disguises (formerly Anonymous Forum - MDL-1071). This is a work-in-progress and I have a working prototype with basic functionality already. I hope to be able to set aside a week at some point to try and finish my prototype and get some initial feedback.
Regarding your specific items:
1) Sticky posts
Sticky posts are an interesting one. There have been a number of patches along the way, and the latest from Charles looks pretty good. He has already identified an integration blocker regarding it. The main blocker though is that Sticky Posts do not have a pedagogical purpose.
The Moodle Forum is intended to be a single-use forum. You use it to discuss a single topic, and any essential information which would be found in a Sticky Post should be in the forum description. This is a view that Martin has put forward at various points, and has re-iterated in discussion about this feature.
Personally, I can see a place for this kind of functionality, but I think that it is also highly dependent upon the ability to freeze discussions in real-usage. The pedagogical use to me is that individual discussions can be pinned as important for those students coming back to view the content again later.
2) Renderables / Renderers / Templates
I've attempted to work on this numerous times too. Jetha has recently done so, but he has now moved on to greener pastures over in Japan. Again, this is one of the features I am really keen to work on and to finish. I deliberately held off on doing this work until the new template system arrived, which it did in Moodle 2.9. Now it is here, I simply haven't had any time to pick this up again. I started looking at it again 2 weeks ago.
Personally I see this as the biggest blocker to all forum changes and this has my highest priority.
3) Reports for forum
I'm really hoping that someone can define more of what they want here. With the new logging systems, we should be able to do more. I would love to close this (it's the oldest open Moodle issue), but other items are higher on my personal list. A decent specification for this item would bump it up the chain significantly.
4) Accessibility
This is very related to item 2. It's also one that is high on our radars. I have tried to address this before at the same time as 2, but I think this made things too complicated and ultimately led to the problems that I was having. I think that this needs to be completed once we have 2 in place, but hopefully straight after.
5) Edit inline
Again, very dependent upon the templates, but also on our forms library in general.
To my mind, 2 is the most important because it also enables a host of other things:
- ability for designers to change the DOM structure
- improved accessibility (4)
- allows templating of forum e-mails too
- easier to add new features like sticky posts (1), and user disguises
I'm sorry that we haven't made as much progress on the forum as we would like. I am actively trying to improve the forum. The forum is an incredibly complicated module, largely because it supports so many use-cases and has so many diverse and inter-connected features (multiple groups + grouping modes, multiple distinct types of forum with different features and functionality, email out, subscriptions to both discussion + whole module, digests, post read tracking, rss, etc.). This complexity is often forgotten, and I suspect that when I look at the code for the sticky discussions, this will be the case there too - it simply doesn't make sense to pin posts in a blog forum for example.
Hope that helps explain the state of play,
Andrew