Martin Dougiamas

The high numbers for dfwikiteam might be because they have been adding each new version into contrib as a new project instead of updating their existing files ...

But I'm really looking forward to seeing the new wiki ready!

Just to be clear, that was not my estimate, it was a quote from a developer using fairly standard US hourly contract rates.

But yes, it can be surprising what Free software costs. Look at the project costs here: http://www.ohloh.com/projects/25

I don't think there is a rush to create more and more features that no-one needs ... Roles is a structural thing that consolidates hundreds of different feature requests into one system - it'll make a LOT of things easier in future. Likewise the XMLdb feature simplifies things for developers and increases stability.

I couldn't agree more about focusing more on testing and QA, but sometimes we have to go where the funding is. Few people want to fund developers for testing and QA, so I need to find that money from elsewhere. The process for this has improved markedly in the past few months since we set up the tracker, by the way.

Currently in 1.8 our focus is totally on smaller usability issues, and a long list of fixes/cleanups (not new features) (see MDL-7396) because people are in fact paying us to work on that. .

About the gradebook, the planned gradebook rewrite was last week costed at US$45,000. I really would like to see it done for 1.8 but we need to find that funding (or someone good to step up and volunteer their own time). Perhaps you can ask your university.

You need to use the full tags (don't blame me, blame PHP).

in Moodle, though, you can use:

<?php p($myvar) ?>

and probably should.

The teachers list on the course listing is currently composed of all the people who have the capability to update the course settings for that course:

moodle/course:update

excluding people who have been granted the capability "moodle/site:doanything" at site level (ie site admins).

A new setting to choose the roles that appear in the course descriptions is a good idea - should be 1.8.