Hello,
I've been looking at trying to make both Collapsed Topics and Grid formats work with subsections in Moodle 4.5 (https://docs.moodle.org/405/en/Course_homepage#Add_a_subsection). As both formats retain the ability to alter the number of sections via a setting after the course has been created is problematic. This has lead me to look at how things work, which has lead me to raise MDL-84038 (related to core functionality) which I then discovered links to MDL-83056, were subsections are considered 'real sections' and should respect the 'maxsections' core setting.
But... are subsections really 'sections' in a course but are actually a means of breaking apart a parent section? On MDL-83056 in relation to subsections obeying 'maxsections', I've commented:
I've been thinking about this and now it seems to me to be a bad idea. Take the situation where a user creates a course. They select the number of sections they want in the first instance. These 'sections' are full ones. Now if they have the maximum number of sections then go and discover that they can't add sub sections such that they can break apart the content in a section then they're going to get frustrated. They'll then have to deleted some sections (not what they want to do for the course design they have in mind) in order to add sub sections. Now the course is not structured in the way that they wanted in the first place. Therefore sub sections should not obey 'maxsections' but possibly have a new 'maxsubsections'. As when creating a course you can't say that I want ten sections with the third and fifth having two sub sections each.
To me sections and subsections are two different things and shouldn't be restricted by the same thing. Just like mixing up different units and thinking that the measurement represents the same thing.
What do you think please? Also comment on the respective tracker issues if desired.
Gareth