Martin Dougiamas

Actually the mediaplugins filter cvs:/moodle/filter/mediaplugin/filter.php already does that for youtube videos.

http://cvs.moodle.org/moodle/filter/mediaplugin/filter.php?revision=1.54&view=markup&pathrev=HEAD

You can see where it's detecting patterns and substituting code.

Makes sense to extend that for images too. Send us a patch in the tracker!

I doubt anyone will kill MySQL, even if Oracle did want to (which I doubt).

It's open source, and the majority of people use it as their database. There will be maintainers for a long time...

My vote +1 also for dropping MySQL 4 support in Moodle 2.0 (and I agree with Penny about 5.0.25)

Postgres 8.2 seems fine to me also if it brings us SQL we can use a lot.

As for the other suggestions we have to distinguish between requirements and recommendations, especially when it comes to client software. I think we need to keep IE6 for example (just a bit longer), and though PG 8.3 may run faster is it really different in how we use it from in Moodle?

Hi Ian!

Thanks so much for rolling up your sleeves and getting stuck in! It's really very much appreciated.

Yes, I think most people would love to see designers empowered to make Moodle life more beautiful. That's a big part of the push towards a more consistently implemented page/blocks/theme framework in the Navigation 2.0 work.

Moodle is in a unique position compared to other web sites because it allows so much customisation at different levels. Unlike any particular web site (eg Radio 4) which have a design based around a constant data structure we need to provide a system where ordinary teachers without any design experience can completely create and customise their own web site. A large part of the design is left to the teachers.

Let me just respond to your points (my intention is not to sound defensive but to get further feedback from you!):

PART 1:

We really need some examples from you of these. The examples may be obvious to you but we need screenshots with arrows. My guess is that a lot of the smaller issues (like whitespace) are easily solved with a bit of CSS in the current themes.

PART 2:

Have you seen the Chameleon theme that Urs developed? It lets you edit the CSS directly in the web browser (using a GUI!) and then save it to the server. It's pretty amazing but I don't think it's widely used because it's quite complicated. Surely it's better to use custom tools for the job (like CSS editors and Firebug on a local copy of Moodle)?

There is also a "custom" theme developed as part of the GSOC (still a bit rough code-wise) which was designed to a) allow users to customise their own very basic colors etc using menus and b) allow admins to easily add raw CSS. Yes, it could easily be modified to use the new Repository support I suppose ..

Possibly this is just a workflow issue about where/how to edit the CSS, the restrictions you may be feeling could be due to institution access and policy rather than Moodle itself.

About using id and div tags: over the past few years we've added hundreds of these hooks all over the place already (are you using Moodle 1.9?). Each page has its own unique id, each block of info is surrounded by one or more divs ... I think it's generally possible to get your CSS pretty much anywhere ... specific examples would help here.

The example of "could it [a link to a book module] be a small image that shows what the content of the book will be?" ... are you proposing this be done purely through CSS? Wouldn't that be a huge amount of manual work for teachers?

Thanks for engaging, please keep doing so!

My +1 vote (only) for "template name" and "template file".

Adma hope you upgrade your site soon to 1.9.4 at least! http://moodle.org/security