Martin Dougiamas

I ran into http://www.learnclick.com/ ... I wish Moodle had a graphical way to edit cloze questions that was as easy as that.

Surely it's not too hard now to have a new editor that can read and write our cloze text format.  A start was made here and then abandoned: MDL-16154   Any volunteers to finish that off?

Yes, please ignore HTML and design for now on the clone site.  It's just for development/experiments and not ready for much feedback yet.

However, regarding the feeds on the home page, I think it's essential to "surface" some of the many things going on around moodle.org to the front page.   Currently everything we do is very buried and there is no indication of life at moodle.org.  it should be more like a portal into everything.

You should also notice this difference in the feeds:

• http://clone.moodle.org/?lang=en
• http://clone.moodle.org/?lang=es_es

The moodle.org theme is not going to be the standard Moodle theme because:

• A lot of sites will look like moodle.org (bad for branding and recognition)
• It's a lot more work.

I would like to change the focus of "Using Moodle" to being the English support course, more equal to the other languages.

Your ideas here (which I understand basically replicates common forums on other sites) make sense to me for that, Visvanath, as much as we can do it on the forum overview page.  I'm not sure if we should commit to a whole new course format, though, as some of these support courses have useful activities/resources other than forums in them, and I don't think we should restrict every language community on moodle.org to forums ONLY when we have all these useful Moodle tools.  However, maybe someone can come up with a much better course format that supoprts all these things.

I would suggest that we move the more international development-oriented forums into a new course specifically for that purpose (it would still be English only).  Combining everything made sense when Moodle was smaller but now I think they just confuse a lot of teachers who are simply looking for help.

We've also talked about moving the forums about plugins into a central place that is automatically connected from each entry in the Moodle plugins database.

As I've traditionally been the person who decides this, I guess I should answer.  

Generally we are including fewer and fewer new plugins in core, as we move towards pushing everything into the Moodle Plugins database and using manual/automatic means of installing/updating plugins in any given Moodle.   Soon you will be able to click a button in Moodle plugins database to install a module directly in your own Moodle, for example.

This is similar to platforms such as operating systems, web apps and mobile phones, which ship with a basic set of core functionality but make it easy for you to extend your platform in whatever direction you want.

The exceptions in my view are:

1. Plugins that almost everyone in every education sector would find useful and fills a gap in Moodle without overlapping on existing functionality much (eg Book).
2. Plugins that are small and optional but flesh-out a list of options, such as new authentication plugins or grading methods.

Maintenance is always a concern.  Moodle Pty Ltd has resources for maintaining our core code but they have a limit and I have to be careful not to stretch us too thin.  We love volunteers but the fact is they do often move on after some time.