Martin Dougiamas

"Are we wasting our time I wonder? "

Definitely not, Derek.   In fact I'm very glad to see the increase in interest in designing course formats.  The original weeks+topics ones were really only quick versions that I did and I expected to see a lot more alternatives created a long time ago.

What's happening from HQ side:

1. You'll see in the Roadmap we have "Course formats refactoring", almost definitely happening in 2.4.  This is primarily about improving the course formats to make them able to easily take over the whole page, define their own settings and so on.  This will give plugin authors like Itamar everything they need to produce 100% pluggable course formats that do exactly what various users want and hopefully we'll get some of those in core after normal review.
   
   
2. The current week/topic formats are tied up with backward-compatibility issues and it can be really difficult to see how they should evolve so that a) they remain useful, b) they don't get too confusing and c) they don't break courses during upgrade and d) their own design is self-consistent.  For example, adding features to the non-paged view to make it more like the paged view means there is basically no difference between them.  Some of the custom ideas rely on things like "short section names" which we can not enforce in core.  And so on. However, we are looking at this and trying to solve the issues.  Thanks for the reflection and ideas!

Indeed the main idea in 2.3 was that navigation should be used for navigation, but I do take your point that it can still be painful with a long course list.

I don't know any developers using Git on Windows ... that may be the root of the documentation issue.  

I can recommend that you not worry about using the command-line (the black box) and to instead try one of the many GUI clients out there.   eg http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/5-windows-git-clients-git-job/

TortoiseGit might be the simplest alternative that will be enough to easily "fetch" an initial copy of the current Moodle repository into your home directory and then "pull" updates of new versions whenever you want to.  All the rest is really only useful if you are editing code and sharing those edits.

Perhaps someone else might like to contribute some detailed instructions to this discussion as I don't have Windows handy.  This looks like a good start.  When it comes time to enter the Moodle git repository, use git://git.moodle.org/moodle.git and choose the MOODLE_23_STABLE branch.

There's a lot happening in this field right now, yet it's still so poorly defined.

Moodle has quite a lot of reports already but they are scattered all over the place and could certainly be improved a lot.

I hope this forum helps to bring us together to work on what reporting and analytics should look like in Moodle core, as well as sharing our ideas for various other developments and approaches that we are all working on.

So are you saying that the files were missing from before the upgrade?  Because that looks like the cause of this.