General help

Atto is really a better choice for Moodle's future than TinyMCE. Though I was *a bit* reluctant at first, but that doesn't mean you have to use it yet. 

However I agree with a lot of what has been said here. Even when you understand the rationale behind the changes and have the chance to test them before hand etc, its a lot of work for everyone, the plugin developers, the theme developers, the admins and the people like Don who have to go off and explain it all to hapless teachers. And it doesn't help that most people really won't see much improvement over the old editor. A lot of the goodness is under the hood. Luckily we can still select TinyMCE as the editor.

What really interests me having read this, is how many 2.7 users use Atto and how many use TinyMCE.

Users will always complain about non-trivial software updates* or changes to the interface, the question is how much of a problem do the changes really cause. 

I recently had to come to terms with the way Windows 8 requires you wave your mouse in the general direction of a popup box to make it go away breaking with the conventions of several decades. I would like to have had the designer of that "feature" in the room  to forcefully explain the error of that change.

I may be involved in an upgrade to 2.7 and Dons post has made me wonder about the virtue of setting TinyMCE as the default instead of Atto so the users have one less thing to get used to.

Marcus

(*and trivial ones come to think of it)

Hi Everyone,

Just a reminder, this is not a discussion about Atto vs. TinyMCE.  It is a discussion about whether 2.7 is ready to be released and what priorities are chosen in release designs. We love the initial appearance of Atto and we are locked into whatever Moodle HQ chooses as the default editor (we need video-anywhere and PoodLL plugins to Atto for example).  So Atto is it.  But that is not this discussion.

To answer my initial question, in terms of teacher productivity, Moodle 2.7 is not ready for release. It is a regression because it makes course authoring harder, not easier. Likewise I would not recommend Moodle 2.8 (code freeze on October 6th) as an upgrade if there are no improvements in course authoring.

Is course authoring the number one priority for the development of Moodle?  I believe it is.  There has been a dramatic shift in power away from global publishers to local self-publishers.  It has shifted away from expert designers to bricolage. Power has shifted from proprietory IP to open educational resources (OER). It really is the bazaar vs. the cathedral. I wrote a research paper trying to describe these post-modern power shifts within a blended, Moodle environment. Further, I believe the paradigm shift of Moodle 3.0 should mirror the paradigm shift in Education 3.0, which in my view, is towards mass collaborative authoring and sharing.  In this vision, the Hub, sharing tools, and authoring editors are the heart and soul of Moodle 3.0.

So there are political decisions to be made here: what course authoring features should be default? 

Atto is not set in stone.  It can be as productive and more productive than TinyMCE.  The problem is that it was released prematurely without a sense of teacher productivity as the highest priority. In Moodle 2.5, teacher productivity was higher due to default features such as:

• drag image resizing
• large variety of text colors (darker choices are better)
• large variety of background colors (lighter choices are better)
• text resizing

I am sure there are other productivity enhancements in the pipeline, and I would like to get links to Tracker issues so they can be pushed forward and make the Moodle 2.8 release into one that shifts priority into the hands of teachers.

Derek, that conversation was with me (not an HQ developer), and it was a private email conversation. I don't mind Don quoting me, but I should add that I am actually in the Atto camp. I was really just explaining why in my opinion the ability to alter font colors and sizes etc was limited in Atto.

It only takes a search of the forums to see the pre Atto debate with quotes like "we should be getting our teachers managing content, not managing design." And there is a logic there, I just think it applies more to corporate than to academic institutions. The points about accessibility are also good. Who knows what tipped the scales in the end. 

Making Atto the default was probably premature, but there is no reason we can't just bang out  plugins that do what we feel is missing. I can vouch for the fact that Atto is a heck of a lot easier to write plugins for than TinyMCE.

"Puzzled, I checked with a developer I knew, who warned me that the choice of a new editor was quite ideological, that the decision was based on the assumption: "Style should be left to the theme and site designer and done in CSS so its consistent site wide"

I have read this kind of thing before in Moodle and seen "hyped" (manufactured) examples of bad editing. My take is this:

• Do you trust your staff to use office applications?
  
• When using office applications do your staff turn everything green and wobbly?
• If they do, how do you deal with it, do you:

1. Lock down the software, turn everything off, strip it back, don't let them do anything
   
2. Put out some brand / style guides, set your standards / expectations and maybe provide some templates

Here is the argument for stripping down Moodles text editor:

https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=223125

And here is the same argument / example applied to MS Word:

Whichever option you choose for editing office documents will probably work for any other "publishing" platform / application including Moodle.

If the strategy being taken with Atto is "lock down" we wont ever move to it.

An old quote by one of our Acedemics taken from a newsletter in 2004:

And an example of the kind of things we do to keep it that way:

http://styleguide.bcu.ac.uk/ (that one is aimed at people building interfaces, there are equivalents for other applications, different types of user)

Oh, and my final word is this... lets say you lock down the text editor and have no style guides, what happens when your students click to open files, office documents, pdf? What will they look like?

Locking down Moodles text editor pretty well pointless as a lot of the content available through Moodle courses is not even created in the text editor.

Locking down Moodles text editor is counter productive all it will do is discourage users from adding content into Moodle and encourage scroll of death, because scroll of death is the only way they will be able to format content the way they want to.

Mauno, you say it so much better than I ever could... excellent ideas. 

So, how about a minimalist "out-of-the-box" Moodle and users download and install the plugins they need? Would that meet the idea that you, and Derek, and Jez, and Don, and Tom, Dick and Harry have been discussing, "what about individual needs?" 

That would mean that a small crew would be needed to concentrate on the really minimalist Moodle, making it robust and aiming at being bombproof, and everyone else just concentrating on building and testing plugins. Those plugins would need to be rigorously tested, before they made it to the plugins download page. But as long as they played nicely together, would it not mean Admins could build the Moodle their site really needs?  

Dear Mauno,

Thanks for taking a peek at this forum to offer an historical perspective and the most useful message so far (by votes). The chart you posted is very interesting. I will probably want to reference it in paper I am writing. But, excuse me, the colors you used are all wrong--I recommend you stick to commentary, not design. Actually, I know a good site designer you should hire to handle your color selection and font sizing.  </sarcasm> 

>> One of the main reasons was YUI - Atto was "fully moodle", written to use YUI that is now suddenly no more actively supported.   [note by Don: here we need a way to auto colorize/fontize a quoted phrase]

That's odd.  You say one reason Atto was chosen is YUI, but now YUI is dropped. Hmm.  But back to my original question, the editor 'selection' is not the point of this discussion, but rather whether the default editor chosen was ready for release. Where teachers are actively creating content (most places I believe) the design of the Atto editor dramatically hurts productivity. Crippling productivity was a choice, a misguided choice. The Atto editor needs to change about four points to restore productivity. More importantly, Atto should be enhanced with new features to accelerate content creation by teachers and those values should be given top priority in building Atto defaults.

>> Moodle 2.7 allows changing default editor on site level but also on user level - in user profile.

Well, shut my mouth. I did not know that--I thought it was a site setting only. Thank you, Mauno. Whoever decided to implement an individualized profile-selectable editor was not being so "arrogant". 

>> A bigger problem is that world wide web is full of cool tools for creating interactive content but teachers cannot always embed that "shared" code because security settings of moodle do not allow teachers to use that code in such activities that also students can use.

Well said. Creative, interactive content creation by teachers should be given priority, while limiting security issues.