Martin Dougiamas

For years a lot of us have been thinking about a variety of problems to do with the display of Moodle and how bits are put together, including general navigation, blocks, layout and themes. In particular Tim Hunt has been spending a lot of time on this recently for us.

The solutions are not always obvious, and I'd really like to see more of the community engaging with these issues and helping to define the best way forward.

It would be nice to come to some consensus for at least some of these by 2.0, and so with this aim, let's make next week "Navigation, Layout, Blocks, Themes and Other Stuff Week!" (NLBTAOSW - catchy isn't it?)

Your homework starts here on this evolving overview:

http://docs.moodle.org/en/Development:Navigation_2.0

Your assignment next week is to engage in the discussions and vote on proposals as they come up!

The main block class should have an applicable_formats() method like this:

function applicable_formats() {
return array('all' => false, 'my' => true);
}

Apart from different database formats ... you could try and make sure the quizzes are split up into less questions per page ... this will spread out the database accesses into more but smaller chunks.

And obviously you could get more CPU, more RAM, faster disks ...

3Mb? That seems very high! I'm seeing about 300k uncompressed on a vanilla Moodle site with all AJAX on, of which about 117k is CSS (measured using Yslow for Firebug).

Perhaps it would best to think about this in terms of a generic report generator ... I think there's some open source ones around and one could be customised for Moodle, or a Moodle plugin would communicate directly to an external one.

Of course finding the best one to start with would be part of the project

Some examples of report generators :

• http://www.hkvstore.com/phpreportmaker/
• http://phpreports.sourceforge.net/
• http://jasperforge.org/plugins/project/project_home.php?group_id=102
  

Ah, I just saw Matt's post ... yes, exactly.