General help

Never left.


You could download the current code and see for yourself at:
http://moodle.org/download.php/modules/blog.zip
You'll find a readme and todo document in the cvs file list. I added a "needs testing" section to the todo file so folks who are interested have an idea of where they could help out.

Some overview of the ideas behind the code and general discussion (Russ's comments are great) can be found at the discussion I started on the topic (when it was still called "simplog" versus "moodle blog")
http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=7934


I tried to model as much of what I have now after the blog bug report item:
http://moodle.org/bugs/bug.php?op=show&bugid=285

So, what do I have now related to Martin's bug report?

0) Blogs are a (semi) public space for free-form reflection.
   - When adding a new entry you can
      * Format your entry in the same ways you can format forum entries

1) Most courses will probably only add one Blog activity to a course, up in the top section.
   - Blogs are a top level entity like rss and calendar. They are not course activities. Any user on your site has access to create a single blog in which they can post entries associated with categories. There will be no "blog activity" to be added to a course, but by adding blog side blocks users will have access to view and add to blogs from within a course.

2) Each person can add a new entry at any time. They can specify the availability to be private (student-only), for teacher (student+teacher), for course (other students), for site (all people in site), for public (anyone at all).
   -When adding a new entry you can
      * Choose who to "publish" the post to
         - no one (draft) - published only to yourself
         - all users of this site - meaning only to other user who are logged in to the site where this blog lives
         - everyone in the world - fully public posting available to users who are not logged in/google/etc
         - Further, if you chose to add the post from a link present on a course page then you have the additional publish options of:
            * teachers of this course
            * all users of this course
   - Users can create new categories to associate their posts with
   - Administrators can create site wide categories that any user can associate a post with
   - Teachers of a given course can create course wide categories that any user in that course can associate posts with

3) Blog entries appear as usual, and can have a discussion attached to them for feedback and comments. Each entry can also have a "grade", which is the average of a number of ratings. Normally this might just be the teacher, but it could be the whole class rating each other's entries.
   - Each entry has the ability to have "comments" attached to the entry.
   - There is no grading of entries, but there is an option for users to add "karma" or ratings points to entries (inherited from simplog)

4) The Blog "index.php" page will combine available blogs into one blog display. For example, in a course, a teacher will see all the latest blog entries in the course. A student will see all the entries made available to the class by all students. At the site level, blogs from ALL courses will be combined appropriately. Obviously this page needs paging etc, and some thinking needs to be done about making the follow-up discussions public.
   - I believe that this is all present. I did notice a bug in the paged viewer recently which I need to look into, but there is a primary blog index page which aggregates all blog entries into one view, the user can select from a drop down list of "filters" to view posts by criteria.

Thanks for asking,
Daryl