Martin Dougiamas

Works OK for me on test.moodle.com

Unicode is obviously the future, providing a single way to represent all characters rather than the mish-mash of incompatible encodings we have at the moment.

We need to start thinking about moving to Unicode, with or without proper PHP support for it. Having a consistent encoding will make it easier to include multiple languages on one page, and simply a lot of issues when dealing with text.

The problem is that it appears any conversion process is going to be slightly less than 100% exact, and the amount of data being generated every day in Moodles around the world under old encoding rules is a bit staggering (the problem grows over time)

What we need is an implementation plan ... a step by step analysis of how we are going to convert old texts, modify core Moodle code, and ensure that all new text is always in UTF-8. I have a sense of what is required from pages like these:

• php and unicode
• Unicode Data with PHP 5 and MySQL 4.1
• I18N_UnicodeString in PEAR
  
• utf8_encode function in PHP
  

but does someone want to tackle a proper roadmap for us and give us all a realistic perspective on this job?

Speaking of which, I'm starting to think Moodle should make the final push to Unicode over the next few months.  The more we leave it the more problems we will have.

You can set smtphosts to something wrong (a machine that doesn't exist).  This is what I do on my development machines ever since that occasion a year or two ago when I was working with a copy of Using Moodle and sent test mail to everbody. 

OK, I've had these ideas percolating for a while and a chat with Tom Murdock tonight (in the new 1.5 Messaging tool) has helped me click some things together into a possible plan (see? social constructionism in action!).

I'm just putting this forward to get my ideas, er, documented, particularly regarding the programming side of things in Moodle. As you'll see there are many details that the Documentation Leader still needs to organise.

In a nutshell, here it is:

1. Every page in Moodle could have a help button in standard locations (in the header and footer).
   
   
2. The link this button contains would be automatically generated based on the page URL you are currently on and the current language: eg: http://documentation.moodle.org/course/view/es
   
   
3. The documentation site could be a MediaWiki, so you would be looking at a Wiki page you could contribute to. If the URL doesn't exist, then a new page is created there and you are invited to help complete it!
   
   
4. Each language page would contain a clear menu or block allowing us to jump easily between different language versions of that page. This might require slight hacks to MediaWiki, which is fine. I don't know what we could put on the "root" page (eg http://documentation.moodle.org/course/view) but I'm sure someone will think of something! Comparison tools? Auto-choose best language?
   
   
5. Each page would not only contain official documentation describing all the functions on that page but discussions, tips, links to related resources, notes about different versions, history, rationale, authors, contact details etc. Everyone can easily contribute because it's a single click from their own Moodle. We need to think about the policy on editing rights.
   
   
6. There would still be a need for non-page related documentation, such as the HTML editor, for example, and overviews for teachers and so on, but they would have a wealth of information to link to, and the names of the links will be obvious (same as the Moodle URLs). These help pages themselves can have simple, standard URLs like http://documentation.moodle.org/editor/spelling/ja which we would hard-code in Moodle code.
   
   
7. The database is going to be huge because of all the screenshots and languages, so most people won't want to (or need to) install it locally (this allows us to make Moodle much leaner because we won't need all the lang/xx/help files any more!). For those who do want a local copy of the Wiki, we can provide a complete archive of the data so they can set up their own documentation site, and there can be a simple admin variable in Moodle to point those links to the local site instead!
   

I'm feeling very good about this as a starting point we can achieve in the Moodle code relatively soon - I'm sure the collective brains here will have many more ideas!