General help

Here is my first attempt to upgrade the Moodle-WIKINDX filter to make full use of the new ‘CMS hooks’ in WIKINDX 3.7, kindly provided by Mark Grimshaw and the rest of the WIKINDX team.

Please use at your own risk, particularly on 'production' servers. That said, the filter does not make any changes to the Moodle database structure, and is working without problem in my hands (Moodle 1.6.x and Moodle 1.8.x with WIKINDX 3.7.1)

The code is based on Dan Stowell’s original, together with John Weare’s phpWCMS code as outlined in the README_CMS file bundled with WIKINDX, edited, as far as possible, to conform with Moodle coding gudelines.

When it’s installed and configured, you can add citations to any Moodle text (Topics, Labels, Text page, HTML block, Forum posting etc) by adding ‘tags’ of the form wikindx:xxx, where xxx is the WIKINDX ID of the reference (this is backwards-compatible with Dan’s original filter).

The filter (through the 'magic' of WIKINDX) replaces wikindx:xxx with a nicely formatted citation e.g. (Dougiamas and Taylor 2003). In most cases, this also acts as a hyperlink back to the full entry in your WIKINDX database.

If required you can also add the ‘tag’ wikindx_full, typically at the end of a block of text containing citations, which will be replaced with a bibliography consisting of a sorted list of full citations in the appropriate style. e.g.

Bibliography

Cole, J., 2005. Using Moodle: Teaching with the Popular Open Source Course Management System. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly Media.

Dougiamas, M. Moodle. Available from: http://moodle.org [Accessed 11 September 2007]

Dougiamas, M. & Taylor, P.C., 2003. Moodle: Using Learning Communities to Create an Open Source Course Management System. In: Proceedings of World Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia and Telecommunications (EDMEDIA), 2003 Honolulu, Hawaii. Chesapeake, VA: AACE 171–178.

The citation/bibliographic style can be chosen, and edited, in WIKINDX. In developing and testing this filter, I have mainly used a variant of the Harvard format that my institution favours. So don’t be too surprised if you experience odd things with other formats! You can further customise the display in Moodle (e.g. use a smaller font size, draw a box around bibliographies etc) through editing Moodle CSS settings (see the bundled readme.txt for more information).

Following the recommendations in the WIKINDX documentation, installation does require the creation of an additional /temp folder with chmod 777 permissions in the Moodle web-root. This provides a location for the temporary text files used for communication between Moodle and WIKINDX. I’m uncertain of the security implications of this, so will be happy for the advice and guidance of any Web-server gurus.

One of the few things I couldn't get to work properly was the WIKINDX query string parameter wikindxLink=1. I may have been doing something daft, but it appeared to create hyperlinks to Moodle rather than Wikindx. For the moment, I have worked around this by splicing in some of Dan Stowell's code for hyperlinking back to WIKINDX. I have commented this in the code, in the hope that someone (Mark?) can suggest a fix.

You can download the Moodle-WIKINDX filter and see it in action here. I'll be happy to add it to the Moodle Modules and Plugins database if it proves useful. Unzip the download bundle and see the accompanying readme.txt file for installation instructions.

Enjoy