Hi all,
At a recent Moodle developer meeting, I introduced a proposal to significantly improve the conditional availability system.
Some key parts of this improvement are:
- Allow OR (and NOT) conditions.
- Improve the user interface for availability restrictions on the activity/section settings form.
- Make restriction types (date, grade, etc.) into plugins.
I've now filed a Moodle Tracker issue MDL-44070. Attached to that issue is a Word document with a fairly detailed outline of the development. If you want a quick overview, I'd suggest the presentation above - if you have questions about the detail, please go to the tracker issue and look at my document first.
As a member of the Moodle community, here are some ways you might want to contribute now:
- If you like the proposals and want to see them in Moodle 2.7 (or whatever version), please vote for the tracker issue.
- If there is something important I've forgotten or that won't work, or you have other concerns about the change, or you think restricting access to anything is a waste of time because the NSA can read it all so why not students, go ahead and say so.
- If you have a feature/improvement you'd like to be included in this change which isn't yet, feel free to ask (let me know the MDL number for the feature request). I'll try to avoid increasing the scope - it's already a rather large and monolithic change - but even if I don't want to include it, I can at least consider how well your improvement would fit with this change.
Important caveat: this relies on my time being allocated to the development by my employer (The Open University). I don't yet have full confirmation of this but it is looking positive so I am ready to go ahead with investigation, prototyping, etc. So just a warning that I might have to stop or delay development later if something else comes up, but I hope that doesn't happen.
That said, I think this is going to be a really nice improvement because the current interface is pretty clunky and limited, so I'm hopeful that most people will like it.
Thanks for reading.
--sam