Moodle tip: Add course posters (with a Mahara flavour)

Re: Moodle tip: Add course posters (with a Mahara flavour)

by Mary Cooch -
Number of replies: 2
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Hello Peter. For blocks that don't appear in the drop down on the actual poster page, you first need to add them to the main course page and then from the dropdown "where this block appears" choose "any page" and then when you go to the poster, configure the block again to display on  "Poster module main page". Documentation will be written for the plugin - if David is too busy at the moment I will try to write some myself this week. However, if you look at the plugins page in the section "Usage", note that in number 6, David has explained this point there: https://moodle.org/plugins/view/mod_poster

Average of ratings: Useful (2)
In reply to Mary Cooch

Re: Moodle tip: Add course posters (with a Mahara flavour)

by Paula Clough -

Wow, this is awesome. I can see this being a great presentation tool for the groups to present to the rest of the class as well as a teacher tool.

Thanks for letting us know about this! Thanks David for developing this plugin.


cool

In reply to Mary Cooch

Re: Moodle tip: Add course posters (with a Mahara flavour)

by David Mudrák -
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Thanks Mary for the perfect explanation.

Peter, yes. The reason for this is that every Moodle block can declare the page type it can be added to. Unfortunately for us here, the default value for this is (let's the code speak):

function applicable_formats() {
    // Default case: the block can be used in courses and site index, but not in activities
    return array('all' => true, 'mod' => false, 'tag' => false);
}

so the block developer has to explicitly allow adding the block instances to activities. So the way around is to create the block in the parent course and let it display on certain page types only, as Mary describes.

Note this has another consequence, too. If you are making a backup of the Poster activity (the single activity backup, not the whole course backup), the backup will contain just the blocks that were added into the Poster page directly. If you restore such backup in another course and/or on another site, some Poster blocks might be missing.