Hi
I would like to work helping to improve the blog feature of Moodle.
Before i get started i would like to ask who is the maintainer of the blog and if i can help in any task, or if already there are plans to improve, if the maintainer need´s some help.
I have a large experience in PHP programing.
Thank´s in advance
Hey, great!
My name is next to the blog component in the tracker, but I don't have that much experience with the blog module and I would definitely appreciate help, code, patches and bug report.
In the roadmap for the next version (see http://docs.moodle.org/en/Roadmap#Version_2.0 for details), there are two major things for blogs : support for comments and support for external blogs (which is basically importing blogs from other sources, via rss or other apis). Have a look at http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-8776 for the comment-on-blogs issue.
If you don't have one already, please create an account for yourself in the tracker and have a look at the code..
There are a lot of bugs and requested features for the blog module. Please send comments, patches, etc. on any issue that you find interesting!
Mat
My name is next to the blog component in the tracker, but I don't have that much experience with the blog module and I would definitely appreciate help, code, patches and bug report.
In the roadmap for the next version (see http://docs.moodle.org/en/Roadmap#Version_2.0 for details), there are two major things for blogs : support for comments and support for external blogs (which is basically importing blogs from other sources, via rss or other apis). Have a look at http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-8776 for the comment-on-blogs issue.
If you don't have one already, please create an account for yourself in the tracker and have a look at the code..
There are a lot of bugs and requested features for the blog module. Please send comments, patches, etc. on any issue that you find interesting!
Mat
Hi Mathieu
I will look at the code, the tracker posts about the Blog and the posts in the discussion forum, talking about the blog to realize wich of the features we want to propose can fit in this project.
I will post on tracker these features we want to propose.
- Having a Course Blog feature separate from users blog, where the teachers will have the course Blog, separate from his own personal blog .
- The course Blog can be visible to all in the local Moodle site of the institution, or just to the students of that course.
- Having links ( or mashups!) from anothers blogs inside course blog
- Develop a "podcast" feature in the Blog, user can generate podcasts.
- Develop a "video" feature in the Blog, user can store and display video.
- Navigation to the course Blog interface to Course Blog be presented more friendly to the users.
- Including comments for each post.
- Editing comments with a aprovall.
- Including title and description to a blog.
- Navigation by date.
- Search feature.
- Notify by email for new posts.
- Ranking of most visited Blogs.
I will look at the code, the tracker posts about the Blog and the posts in the discussion forum, talking about the blog to realize wich of the features we want to propose can fit in this project.
I will post on tracker these features we want to propose.
- Having a Course Blog feature separate from users blog, where the teachers will have the course Blog, separate from his own personal blog .
- The course Blog can be visible to all in the local Moodle site of the institution, or just to the students of that course.
- Having links ( or mashups!) from anothers blogs inside course blog
- Develop a "podcast" feature in the Blog, user can generate podcasts.
- Develop a "video" feature in the Blog, user can store and display video.
- Navigation to the course Blog interface to Course Blog be presented more friendly to the users.
- Including comments for each post.
- Editing comments with a aprovall.
- Including title and description to a blog.
- Navigation by date.
- Search feature.
- Notify by email for new posts.
- Ranking of most visited Blogs.
These ideas sound very good!
From an instructor standpoint, the thing I always wanted most (besides comments) was a way to search quickly for the students who were posting based on a prompt from my course. I don't really know how this fits in with your overall scheme, but I really wanted a way to find all the blogs for my students, filtered by course and by prompt. I tried to do it with tags, but the students did not always enter the tags correctly.
I also needed a way to rate the posts right there, instead of writing it all down on paper and then going in and entering the grades in an off-line assignment. I had wished for something more like the ratings for forum postings.
If you want a use case to test your ideas against, consider a freshman seminar class with 300 students. Each has a blog entry due each week. They also have other classes in Moodle which may or may not have a blog requirement.
How is the freshman seminar teacher going to find and rate the posts?
How is the teacher going to locate posts that come in late, but still need to be graded?
How can other members of the course find blog postings based on a particular assignment so that they can read and comment?
Can we get the ratings automatically entered in the gradebook?
Can we get the grade comments (not blog comments, but private comments regarding the grading) to go into the assignment interface?
These ideas might be completely outside the scope of the project you envision, but from an instructor standpoint, it would sure add some nice "assignment" features to the blog if it is going to be graded. And I would think that most blogs get graded in one way or another, even if just a "participation" grade.
atw
From an instructor standpoint, the thing I always wanted most (besides comments) was a way to search quickly for the students who were posting based on a prompt from my course. I don't really know how this fits in with your overall scheme, but I really wanted a way to find all the blogs for my students, filtered by course and by prompt. I tried to do it with tags, but the students did not always enter the tags correctly.
I also needed a way to rate the posts right there, instead of writing it all down on paper and then going in and entering the grades in an off-line assignment. I had wished for something more like the ratings for forum postings.
If you want a use case to test your ideas against, consider a freshman seminar class with 300 students. Each has a blog entry due each week. They also have other classes in Moodle which may or may not have a blog requirement.
How is the freshman seminar teacher going to find and rate the posts?
How is the teacher going to locate posts that come in late, but still need to be graded?
How can other members of the course find blog postings based on a particular assignment so that they can read and comment?
Can we get the ratings automatically entered in the gradebook?
Can we get the grade comments (not blog comments, but private comments regarding the grading) to go into the assignment interface?
These ideas might be completely outside the scope of the project you envision, but from an instructor standpoint, it would sure add some nice "assignment" features to the blog if it is going to be graded. And I would think that most blogs get graded in one way or another, even if just a "participation" grade.
atw
Hi Wyatt
Thank´s for your use case, it is very helpfull to know the vision and problemas the teachers have.
I will try to agregatte these topics in my work in the moment that i find a response for them.
Thank´s
Ângelo
Thank´s for your use case, it is very helpfull to know the vision and problemas the teachers have.
I will try to agregatte these topics in my work in the moment that i find a response for them.
Thank´s
Ângelo
Hi Mathieu
I will focus on reading the code and send you comments, help, code, patches and bug reports.
I do already post on the tracker my requested features.
Ângelo
I will focus on reading the code and send you comments, help, code, patches and bug reports.
I do already post on the tracker my requested features.
Ângelo
How far has this ripened?
Specifically, I wish to have students maintain a blog outside the course work. Some of their posts, which they deem relevant to the course should automatically (provided appropriate setup) be aggregated into the courses moodle pages.
Is this already usable somehow? As far as I know we have 1.9.? installed.
Thanks in advance,
Marko
Specifically, I wish to have students maintain a blog outside the course work. Some of their posts, which they deem relevant to the course should automatically (provided appropriate setup) be aggregated into the courses moodle pages.
Is this already usable somehow? As far as I know we have 1.9.? installed.
Thanks in advance,
Marko
You might want to wait a minute before doing anything in this area.
The Open University is going to release a number of new features to Moodle contrib after our next release goes live to students (in a few weeks).
This includes the 'OU blog' module, a module which the University paid for and was developed by Matt Clarkson from Catalyst IT based on a design originally by me. It's then been tested, tweaked, bugfixed etc by me and our testers here.
The module can be installed into standard Moodle 1.9 with PHP 5. You don't need to patch anything - just use the admin interface to disable the built-in Moodle blog (you can keep that running as well if you really want, but that'll confuse students) and plop the oublog module into the right place.
It includes the following features:
* You can create a course blog (as many as you want, just add an activity) which everyone in the course can contribute to (or not, if you customise permissions). This works like any other moodle module so you can create 'separate' blogs within one activity by using separate groups or visible groups or no groups, groupings, etc.
* Also supports per-user blogs like existing moodle blog via /mod/oublog/view.php?user=666 (for user 666) - there isn't a built-in way to link to these but you can create a link that includes user id on any moodle course, e.g. the site frontpage, so users can get to their blog. (Or you can hack code in profile if you want a link there.)
* Supports comments. (At the moment only logged-in users are allowed to comment, which reduces risk of spam.)
* Atom and RSS feeds of (a) all posts on the blog, (b) all comments on the blog.
* Indexed full-text search of blog posts (if you also install the optional ousearch block; otherwise, it works fine, just no search).
* Blog-specific tag system (i.e. a tag cloud that works for blog posts just within the blog you are looking at, not anywhere else)
* A way to create a list of links within the blog ('blog roll'), also so it works more like a 'real' blog.
* You can change the name of your blog (from 'my name's blog') and write a summary paragraph about it.
(In general these last three sort of make it work like you expect blogs to work from seeing them in other places. The interface should be pretty familiar to most people as a simple blog system.)
Our release is still undergoing testing at the moment and we're really busy right now. However once it is tested and everything's done I will definitely be posting oublog to contrib. I hope it'll be useful for plenty of other sites too even though it obviously won't have every feature you want. Matt from Catalyst did a great job with this and we will be maintaining it (with bugfixes etc) for some time to come.
There is a bunch of other stuff we're going to release around that time too (upgrades to our existing stuff plus at least one other new thing) which I'll talk about when we actually release it! But just wanted to let you know so you don't unnecessarily duplicate something we might have done already. Hopefully you're okay with waiting a few weeks to get it.
--sam
The Open University is going to release a number of new features to Moodle contrib after our next release goes live to students (in a few weeks).
This includes the 'OU blog' module, a module which the University paid for and was developed by Matt Clarkson from Catalyst IT based on a design originally by me. It's then been tested, tweaked, bugfixed etc by me and our testers here.
The module can be installed into standard Moodle 1.9 with PHP 5. You don't need to patch anything - just use the admin interface to disable the built-in Moodle blog (you can keep that running as well if you really want, but that'll confuse students) and plop the oublog module into the right place.
It includes the following features:
* You can create a course blog (as many as you want, just add an activity) which everyone in the course can contribute to (or not, if you customise permissions). This works like any other moodle module so you can create 'separate' blogs within one activity by using separate groups or visible groups or no groups, groupings, etc.
* Also supports per-user blogs like existing moodle blog via /mod/oublog/view.php?user=666 (for user 666) - there isn't a built-in way to link to these but you can create a link that includes user id on any moodle course, e.g. the site frontpage, so users can get to their blog. (Or you can hack code in profile if you want a link there.)
* Supports comments. (At the moment only logged-in users are allowed to comment, which reduces risk of spam.)
* Atom and RSS feeds of (a) all posts on the blog, (b) all comments on the blog.
* Indexed full-text search of blog posts (if you also install the optional ousearch block; otherwise, it works fine, just no search).
* Blog-specific tag system (i.e. a tag cloud that works for blog posts just within the blog you are looking at, not anywhere else)
* A way to create a list of links within the blog ('blog roll'), also so it works more like a 'real' blog.
* You can change the name of your blog (from 'my name's blog') and write a summary paragraph about it.
(In general these last three sort of make it work like you expect blogs to work from seeing them in other places. The interface should be pretty familiar to most people as a simple blog system.)
Our release is still undergoing testing at the moment and we're really busy right now. However once it is tested and everything's done I will definitely be posting oublog to contrib. I hope it'll be useful for plenty of other sites too even though it obviously won't have every feature you want. Matt from Catalyst did a great job with this and we will be maintaining it (with bugfixes etc) for some time to come.
There is a bunch of other stuff we're going to release around that time too (upgrades to our existing stuff plus at least one other new thing) which I'll talk about when we actually release it! But just wanted to let you know so you don't unnecessarily duplicate something we might have done already. Hopefully you're okay with waiting a few weeks to get it.
--sam
Sam - mate that's awesome news. I was in the crowd of eager onlookers at your "things we've made that you can have" presso at the UK Moot last year... and the OU Blog stuff was about top of my list of cool stuff.
Are you going to be at the next online developers' meeting? It'd be great if you and Mathieu could discuss the commonalities in roadmap features and the oublog... you're right - it seems like it'd be a stack easier if the two paths could converge and only one module would need to be developed & maintained....?
Are you going to be at the next online developers' meeting? It'd be great if you and Mathieu could discuss the commonalities in roadmap features and the oublog... you're right - it seems like it'd be a stack easier if the two paths could converge and only one module would need to be developed & maintained....?
(Sorry for slow reply, I generally only have time to check the forum infrequently.)
Yes I'll be at the next developer meeting (um, assuming I don't get called away or something - there should be a decent OU presence anyway). I'm happy to discuss oublog (and/or show it) if people want.
In terms of convergence, one issue is that sometimes what our internal course teams want us to do doesn't quite fit into the Moodle 'vision'. Most other Moodle users are probably more flexible in their requirements ('oh, Moodle does that? okay, cool, we'll slightly rethink how we were planning to use it' vs 'oh, Moodle does that? that is totally unacceptable! go and rewrite it!'). As a result, we can end up developing things in a way which wouldn't suit the overall direction of the core Moodle system.
However definitely if Martin D wanted oublog in Moodle 2.0 then we would want to co-operate with that. It may be that there are only minor points of difference that could be addressed with some configuration options etc.
--sam
Yes I'll be at the next developer meeting (um, assuming I don't get called away or something - there should be a decent OU presence anyway). I'm happy to discuss oublog (and/or show it) if people want.
In terms of convergence, one issue is that sometimes what our internal course teams want us to do doesn't quite fit into the Moodle 'vision'. Most other Moodle users are probably more flexible in their requirements ('oh, Moodle does that? okay, cool, we'll slightly rethink how we were planning to use it' vs 'oh, Moodle does that? that is totally unacceptable! go and rewrite it!'). As a result, we can end up developing things in a way which wouldn't suit the overall direction of the core Moodle system.
However definitely if Martin D wanted oublog in Moodle 2.0 then we would want to co-operate with that. It may be that there are only minor points of difference that could be addressed with some configuration options etc.
--sam
Hi Sam
Just great to know about OUBlog! thank´s for letting me know about your project.
I will hold up reading the actual blog code.
What a nice features you designed for OUBlog.
Ângelo
Just great to know about OUBlog! thank´s for letting me know about your project.
I will hold up reading the actual blog code.
What a nice features you designed for OUBlog.
Ângelo
Hey, Sam:
Athabasca University in Canada is very curious to know if/when the OU Blog will be released, since adding comments to blog posts is an important requirement for some of our users as well.
Could you please provide an update on the OU Blog release schedule?
Thanks,
Brian
Athabasca University in Canada is very curious to know if/when the OU Blog will be released, since adding comments to blog posts is an important requirement for some of our users as well.
Could you please provide an update on the OU Blog release schedule?
Thanks,
Brian