What 2014 gave us in Moodle plugins world

What 2014 gave us in Moodle plugins world

av David Mudrák -
Antall svar: 6
Bilde av Core developers Bilde av Documentation writers Bilde av Moodle HQ Bilde av Particularly helpful Moodlers Bilde av Peer reviewers Bilde av Plugin developers Bilde av Plugins guardians Bilde av Testers Bilde av Translators

The 2014 was a good year in Moodle plugins world. Let me pick some milestones that were reached in the last year.

  • 239 Moodle plugins Total of 239 new plugins were approved and added to the Plugins directory. Big thanks to all the developers for continuous maintenance of their plugins. Please feel encouraged to join the community and contribute too! See the plugins documentation and register your new plugin or help by taking on any of these plugins seeking new maintainer.

  • Moodle plugins - Peer reviewed The fellowship of Moodle plugin peer-reviewers was formed. These "Plugin guardians" help a lot with providing initial feedback on submitted plugins during the approval process. Many thanks to Tomasz Muras, Rex Lorenzo, Carl LeBlond and Luke Carrier for the peer-reviews and feedback provided last year. Really appreciated. Please do not hesitate to do a good thing in the next year - offer your time and join these merry men group!

  • We started to highlight interesting plugins and blog about them and their authors. Please check the Featured plugins list for those that received the award in the last year.

  • Old version of Plugins directory look Together with other community portals maintained by Moodle HQ, the Plugins directory site got a new look. I am aware of several areas in the UI and the functionality that I hope will be yet fixed and improved in the next year. All suggestions and bug reports welcome (as usually).

Have a good year everyone. I am looking forward to all your plugins, bug reports, useful forum posts, translation contributions and other forms of participation on this Moodle open source project.

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Som svar til David Mudrák

Re: What 2014 gave us in Moodle plugins world

av Tim Hunt -
Bilde av Core developers Bilde av Documentation writers Bilde av Particularly helpful Moodlers Bilde av Peer reviewers Bilde av Plugin developers

David is too modest. He missed out an important milestone:

  • David Mudrak took over as Moodle Community Developer Manager, and started working on co-ordinating support for Moodle plugin developers, leading to most of the other items in the list.

Thank you David for all you hard work. Please keep it up.

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Re: What 2014 gave us in Moodle plugins world

av Ralf Hilgenstock -
Bilde av Core developers Bilde av Particularly helpful Moodlers Bilde av Translators

Hi David

great work. Thanks.

Actually there are 964 plugins registered. Do you check the 1.000th plugin ?  We can expect this end of February.

Ralf

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Re: What 2014 gave us in Moodle plugins world

av David Mudrák -
Bilde av Core developers Bilde av Documentation writers Bilde av Moodle HQ Bilde av Particularly helpful Moodlers Bilde av Peer reviewers Bilde av Plugin developers Bilde av Plugins guardians Bilde av Testers Bilde av Translators
The 1000 is a boring number. Let us celebrate the 1024th one smiler Seriously, as was mentioned during the last General development meeting, the need for improved navigation and especially searching for plugins starts to be urgent. With so many plugins, it important to be able to find the relevant one. My plan is to introduce a new tagging/labelling system that would allow the community members to create taxonomy over registered plugins. Plus a new role for volunteers who would help with the maintenance of these tags (marking aliases, related labels etc).
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Re: What 2014 gave us in Moodle plugins world

av Derek Chirnside -

David, well done, a good year for plugins.

I'm just doing my dreaded task of reviewing plugins for an upgrade to 2.8.  Where is the best place to get a reverse chronological list of new plugins and updated plugins?

The list at the bottom of the Plugins page https://moodle.org/plugins/index.php of Recently added plugins has no 'more' button.

On a philosophical note, I have two common questions: "Does the plugin work with version X"?  The problem is just because it doesn't SAY it does, doesn't mean it doesn't.  smiler

Secondly, a related question: how to find out information - is it maintained?  what's the best way to find out?  I just hate asking questions of busy developers, and even non-busy ones.  I appreciate being able to find out quickly how developer wants to be contacted: like "DON'T post here in the plugins forum" is useful advice.  

-Derek


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Re: What 2014 gave us in Moodle plugins world

av David Mudrák -
Bilde av Core developers Bilde av Documentation writers Bilde av Moodle HQ Bilde av Particularly helpful Moodlers Bilde av Peer reviewers Bilde av Plugin developers Bilde av Plugins guardians Bilde av Testers Bilde av Translators

Hi Derek

Where is the best place to get a reverse chronological list of new plugins and updated plugins?

Currently, the only available functionality seems to be those RSS feeds mentioned at the top of the plugins directory front page. Unfortunately they are limited to only 20 most recent items, or so. There has been an idea floating back in my mind for some time to have sort of advanced search form that would allow you to generate report for plugins like this ("supported version is 2.8 and order by time approved", etc).

just because it doesn't SAY it does, doesn't mean it doesn't.

Correct. And I believe this is where the community can be particularly useful by giving the feedback to the maintainer ("I just tested this on Moodle 2.8.2, PostgreSQL site and it seems to work well") so that they can mark new Moodle versions as supported.

is it maintained?

Yeah, it's a bit complex and there is no clear sign IMHO. Generally, I would suggest to look at (1) does the maintainer release updates regularly? (2) Are the most recent Moodle stable versions supported? (3) Is the maintainer responsive in the plugin's comments, the plugin's bug tracker, in the plugin's forum etc? This kind of data can be gathered even without contacting the developer. Developers are implicitly subscribed to the comments of their plugins in case you want to contact them publicly - or the explicit discussion forum can be found in Useful links section.

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