Testing and QA

What about making Simplog an entirely new course format?

Friggin brilliant idea.  Wonder if Daryl is open to exploring this as a solution?  Rather than ending up with either SimpMood or MoodSimp, we would have something that looks and behaves like 100% Moodle.

I'm open to exploring new ideas, indeed.
However, I don't see a blog as a course format - it does not fit.
Please take a look at Martin's bug regarding blogging: "Bug #285 - New Blog module to replace Journal module" at http://moodle.org/bugs/bug.php?op=show&bugid=285&pos=7
There is an excellent comment from Vic:
"Having used blogs at my school for a few months, I'd like to add these observations.

We used blogs in two ways; one for personal reflection, the other for text-responses. In the latter, the students were directed by questions from the teacher, and as I understand, had much the same functionality of the journal module. The personal blogs on the other hand, have completely different requirements:

Firstly, students need ownership of the blog. This means the blog would have to be assigned to the *student*, not any course. This might be 'worked around' by using form groups or year groups or similar as courses, but ownership is one of the concepts we identified that makes blogs so appealing to students.

Further to this, I think that having the structure and layout of the blog customisable is very beneficial. How possible would this be (to have the students modify html and css for their own instances of such a module)?

Finally, the ability of students to include pictures and other media is very useful. "

I don't find this surprising at all. A blog is a personal space, a diary, a journal. It's for completely free form, and hopefully aethetically customizable posts. Most blogs are used to interact on a social level outside of course work. Things like "what did I have for breakfast", "Is Christina Aguilara a better artist than Jessica Simpson" and other seemingly off topics rants. However, these off topic rants allow the students to interact with each other and with the teacher at a different level. It can personalize, indivisualize, their interaction with their learning site.

< / rant >

Daryl,

I certainly don't want to reinvent the wheel. I just wanted an RSS block for the courses, and found a simple small class (lastRSS) which does the job. When later the RSS library becomes more standardized, we can agree on something common to use. The block itself is trivial, so updating it to parse RSS feeds using Simplog's parser is very easy. However, my point is that first, Simplog must be integrated into Moodle.

Which brings us to the previous question: what does MoodleSimplog want to be? How do you envision it? (edit: I read your post about the journal replacement above, which answers me. Very nice! )

Regardless of the answer to the above question, the "Moodle way" to do things (Martin correct me if I 'm wrong) is to slowly build an rsslib.php with the library functions (possibly extracted from Simplog, which would already have such a library) so that all Moodle code can use it. Eloy has already started an rsslib.php, so I think we must get organized and work together, no sense writing duplicate code.

In fact the more I think about this the more strongly I believe it, so I have started a new thread detailing this proposal over at the general developer forum.

Jon

It works just fine right now with sitewide configuration, although there are many things to do (featurewise) before it's ready for "general consumption". Should I contrib/ it or blocks/ it?

Which reminds me... we have to do something about a blocks repository.