General help

1. At the top, after the 'require_once...' statement, add:
   

   define('BLOCK_POS_CENTRE', 'c');

2. In the function "blocks_get_positions", change the return line to:
   

   return array(BLOCK_POS_LEFT, BLOCK_POS_CENTRE, BLOCK_POS_RIGHT);

3. Change the function "blocks_move_position" to the following:
   

   function blocks_move_position(&$instance, $move) {

    if($instance->position == BLOCK_POS_LEFT && $move == BLOCK_MOVE_RIGHT) {

    return BLOCK_POS_CENTRE;

    } else if ($instance->position == BLOCK_POS_CENTRE && $move == BLOCK_MOVE_RIGHT) {

    return BLOCK_POS_RIGHT;

    } else if ($instance->position == BLOCK_POS_CENTRE && $move == BLOCK_MOVE_LEFT) {

    return BLOCK_POS_LEFT;

    } else if ($instance->position == BLOCK_POS_RIGHT && $move == BLOCK_MOVE_LEFT) {

    return BLOCK_POS_CENTRE;

    }

    return $instance->position;

    }

1. After outputting the middle column (the line "echo '<td valign="top" id="middle-column">';") add the lines:
   

    if (blocks_have_content($pageblocks, BLOCK_POS_CENTRE) || $PAGE->user_is_editing()) {

    blocks_print_group($PAGE, $pageblocks, BLOCK_POS_CENTRE);

    }

 if ($this->instance->position == BLOCK_POS_CENTRE) {

 $CFG->pagepath = $CFG->wwwroot.'/my/index.php';

 $PAGE = page_create_instance($USER->id);

Hello, David,

Regarding the first point, we are currently making a change to the Open University's OpenLearn Moodle instance which includes making the course boxes "collapsible", allowing each box to be reduced to a title only if required. Please see screenshot. We did not pursue the approach of making the course boxes into topic boxes, however.

We amended course/lib.php, in function print_overview, after the statement which prints the start of the box around the course data, and put in a button which performs a click to hide/click to reveal.  The hiding and revealing of the section was done by using the standard JavaScript function elementToggleHide, in much the same way as is done for the content of blocks (see moodleblock.class.php).

Another change is intended to help with the kind of issue mentioned in your third point - fitting a large amount of information onto the page (necessary because we have increased the number of modules that can print overviews of recent activity - please see Jenny Gray's earlier posting).  We have adopted a "two column" approach to the information that is printed for modules within a course. 

This was simply done by putting each module's information within a div tag is assigned a style in the relevant stylesheet that is left-aligned and given a width of 50%.

These features could be committed to Core if the Moodle community considers them to be desirable, but it is possible that they could conflict with other similar MyMoodle enhancements that might deliver more useful functionality in some contexts:  for example, Mike Churchward's suggestion to allow blocks in the centre column, or your AJAX editing suggestion, and so I would be grateful to know if anyone has developed such changes with a view to committing them to core.

By the way, the other point that I should mention is that we have done a non-course specific print_overview function in Blog. This could also be committed to Moodle Core if the developer community approves.

Thanks,

Gareth Morgan.

Thanks for your reponse! That's very simple. It seems that the My Moodle page is very much loke the blog page, except it has my courses in the center block instead of a blog. Thanks again for your help.

Howard

Hi, Ray,

Thanks for your questions, I'm afraid that there are aspects in which I omitted things or didn't give enough clarity in my forum posting.  To answer your questions in order:

I incorrectly implied that questionnaire was a core module, whereas it is a contrib module, (and should probably have added that my changes will require approval from Mike Churchward as the owner).

With regard to Blog entries - we do check whether the user has the capability to view blogs and filter the posts so private ones are not included in the total, only those visible to the site, or to the whole world.  Presumably if the user has access to MyMoodle, they are already site users, so we should not need to differentiate between site and public visibility? 

Also please note that we only display a count of the number of blog entries, so if blog activity rate is high, this should not make it any more obtrusive than when it is low, although the page that they get to when they click on the link may become more crowded. 

Also, please note that the blog statistics will be part of a site-level activity section on the MyMoodle page that can be completely hidden by admins if it is not applicable (e.g. too large a site with too much top-level activity).

In answer to the question about user roles:  sorry, I should have made that clearer.  We will list all the roles that the user has in the context of the course, separated by commas.  We could make each a hyperlink to the Participants page, where the user can see information about the users who have the role, but this would need some work to ensure that if they did not have the permissions they would not see them as links, only text.  It might be better if we just displayed them as text for the time being.

As concerns the show/hide button and disabling it - we don't actually see any real benefit to having a setting to disable this, other than consistency with block code, assuming that MyMoodle is regarded as the user's personal page to do with as they please.  Could you be more specific on the reason for wanting this functionality?

You are quite right that we should not show the unenrol link without first checking the user's permissions, so access to this link will be governed by the user having permission moodle/role:unassignself in the context of that course.

Regarding the version that we will commit to - I will double-check with our lead developer on this, but it will probably be committed to HEAD, not 1.9 as well, because, as you state, the time remaining is limited.

I hope that these are satisfactory answers to your questions,

Gareth.

Hi Jenny

I was referring to extending the block capability to allow 'middle' blocks (everywhere, but especially on the 'my moodle' page).

I have managed to get a title for the middle section on our my moodle page, but had to use a hack. I really want to be able to do it using the blocks in Moodle. It is so annoying trying to make everything fit down the sides, whilst the centre section may only have one single course listed. A very poor use of space.

Thanks for your follow up Jenny!