Itamar Tzadok

The Dataform has a designated field type for that. It allows displaying info from another Dataform embedded in  the entry rather than by jumping to another page.

1. The fields order in the fields tab is an alphabetical order by name, so if you want the fields there to be ordered in a particular way you need to name them accordingly as indicated by William.

If however your question is rather about sorting entries by fields content, then the Database module allows you to select the default sort field in the fields tab. If you look for more complex sorting you can try the Dataform module.

2 & 3. As William suggests, some more details on your use case could allow us to give a better advice. On the face of it, the Database module doesn't seem to support this requirement. The Dataform module offers a couple of special field types (dataformview and user) that can do this trick for you. They have not been released yet. If you want to discuss them, please do so in the Dataform forum (https://moodle.org/mod/forum/view.php?id=8192).

Conditions on entry content on submission are not yet supported by the Database or Dataform. You can always implement such conditions with javascript which you can add to the 'Add template' or the Javascript tab (with reference to the Add template). You can either listen to the submit event or to field's input element's change event. Of course, javascript is not foolproof, and the user can turn it off and submit entries despite the conditions.

The Dataform allows you to apply conditions by content after submission by means of entry access rules. For instance, you can add an access rule which will allow only managers to see the entry if the content conditions are not met. Managers can then send an alert to the entry author. If you want to discuss this further, please post in the Dataform forum.

hth

The next release of the dataform (in a week or so) will support default content for text and textarea fields in addition to current support for the menu fields.

This would be a very very long list.

... help you achieve 100% participation in your online discussions, the foundation for effective collaboration and communicative learning.

The pedagogy and instructional design aspects should be interesting as there are some clear challenges.

100% participation is arguably hardly the foundation for effective collaboration and communicative learning. Individuals may have different styles of collaboration and communication and not everyone is necessarily the most effective by active participation in a forum. The moodle.org forums are but one example that effectiveness doesn't require 100% participation.

Awarding points for participation is likely to increase the quantity but not the quality. One's effective engagement begins with an opportunity to respond or imitate others' effective engagement. Insofar as the instructor is supposed to instruct what should be learned, we may expect the instructor to make substantial forum contributions that learners can imitate, but this rarely happens. Still, even highly engaged instructors cannot guarantee quality participation from every participant as there are many other factors that affect the overall.

It can thus be argued that from pedagogical and instructional design perspectives, achieving 100% participation in online discussion just for the purpose of participation is not necessarily an important learning objective.

These challenges do not necessarily diminish the prospective (or proved) usefulness of the presented tools. But they may suggest that their usefulness lies elsewhere.