Howard Miller

Are you sure?

...and don't get me wrong, I'm a fan of XSLT, but, having given this some thought I am unsure how to apply it to Moodle. The problem we found here is that non technical users cannot (or will not) edit XML files (or HTML files). This leaves the editing and maintenance of course materials in the province of the Moodle administrators or other IT literate people.

I'm not convinced that this is the way forward (..and ask me how I found this out!). I myself am very interested in finding a way of putting useful formatting facilities into the hands of the educationalists who actually develop the course - who, certainly in our case, would not get on with XML/HTML technologies.

I am currently modifying (fighting with) Moodle to add a resource type called "TikiText", which we 'stole' from the Blog world. This is a very simple formatting system (example: *this will be bold*, /this will be italic/), that users find more intuitive. You are quite right though - this kind of thing really needs to be built in to Moodle to be truly useful.

I also wonder what complexity of formatting you actually need that goes beyond what can be done with the existing Moodle facilities, given that you are willing to get your hands dirty with any kind of mark-up in the first place.

Having said all that --- as I am doing something similar at the moment, if I crack this and there is some interest I would be happy to have a look at putting this together. (I would then be starting to worry that there are too many fundamentaly similar resource types!).

How did you install MySql on the machine?? AFAIK its only installed out of the box on the server version of OSX.

Have you had a look at...

http://developer.apple.com/internet/macosx/osdb.html

At the risk of stating the obvious, you need to get you head around MySql and be sure that its working, before you move forward.

I haven't installed MySql on OSX yet, but have used it extensively on almost everything else. I'm happy to give it a try on my Mac, and step you through it if you are still having problems.

Are you using Apache 2?

It sounds very like the "AcceptPathInfo On" problem. You almost certainly need to add that line into your httpd.conf (as now described in the Moodle installation instructions).

For whatever reason the default action in Apache 2 is not to allow the additional path info style of passing parameters to CGI type programs. Moodle relies on this

Ahh... how new a version of Moodle?

Or failing that, is the module available to retro-fit to an existing installation?

Hi,

I am about to embark on making some code updates and customisations to Moodle.

My question is: just in case I come up with the next big killer feature, which version should I be working from and how best to organise my changes so that I can "give them back", if anybody is interested that is