Arne Pursell

Addendun: for me at least, (and would think for many others), this limitation is almost a deal-breaker. Guess will have to make some calls to blackboard, it's learning etc to see what they want in licensing fees (which my clients really can't afford most likely!)...but as they say, money talks and bs walks!

A shame as it seems this is pretty much one of the few limitations which prevents moodle from eclipsing aforementioned altogether.  The rest of the platform is really solid, and well thought out. But this (idiotic!) oversight is really holding it back...

Essentially it limits moodle to short courses organized week-by-week, or where there just isn't that much content to be distributed. Am well aware it's free! and kudos to developers! Not all of us have access to institutional MS and Adobe licences tho.....!! Would be nice if the developer community could fix this...

I have a pretty long thread here https://moodle.org/mod/forum/user.php?id=2074405 where I detail my struggles with organizing course structure while enabling say pdf popups.  

The gist of it is, why on earth?!!! can we not enable popups for e.g. pdfs, docx, images etc in anything other than main topics pages? 

The second whinge if you like, it really would be ideal if we could change file behavior from withing a file manager. Migrating from a 10+ year old platform, which although has a really diabolically ugly GUI, actually does all of the aforementioned pretty competently. 

Have had a look at plugins for enabling web-viewing of pdfs and word within the browser, as far as I can tell there are only a couple, which are reliant on third-party cloud hosting of files. Word is less important (and guess licensing issues apply), but pdf's are nearly universally viewable on most browsers regardless of platform (win, android, mapple, etc)...why is this such a problem for developers to address?

At present, it looks as though you need a separate 'topic' for each subject where you want to enable pdf popups or on a separate browser tab. 

Thus instead of a course structure where you have say..main subject/theme/topic/subtopic (with pdfs, quizzes, external links, media etc), you end up with 100+ Topic/(activities, quizzes, documents, media etc).  

This structure may well work for 'week to week' course structures, but is far from ideal when you want the whole course accessible and navigable for students.

Any ideas? Is it just me or do others find this laughable? How hard can it be to implement pop-up functionality of items within a folder/subfolder?

Otherwise am really impressed with the platform...have used Blackboard and It's Learning way back when in undergrad and grad school (10+ years ago). Just not looking forward to having to restructuring the course into one 50+ topic long mess just to enable pop-ups. 

Doing this for a friend/client who doesn't want to deal with pages/atto editor...and with a lot of mathematical symbols, copying from word, can understand why. Copy/paste is not an option for maritime navigation course with associated charts etc! Would take months...

Any plugins or suggestions very welcome! Just need students to be able to view pdfs in pop-ups, and have quizzes linked or in same secton.  Of course caveat being...around 5-7 'chapters', with 3-10 subtopics. 50+ topics with no organization seems pretty messy.

Thanks appreciate feedback.

Didn't mean to be snarky there (must be the time spent in aus), but the main problem is that copying/pasting our finished word documents with a lot of formulas, mathematical symbols etc for navigation and so on is incredibly time consuming....the formatting from word just goes haywire in wysiwig interfaces, and with 150+? documents, it would take months.  In fact it did when I helped my Commander put up the old course. Even converting the old course from wysiwig to pdf to word took ages (finding a workflow to convert pdf to word in Norwegian without completely messing up the formatting/turning everything into indecipherable hieroglyphics).

So really that's my dilemma. Have perfectly functioning word docs and pdf's but don't really want 100+ topics with no 'chapters' just to enable pop-up functionality. Or I could just copy paste everything into the ATTO editor (taking months, and then clients are reliant on me for every little update).

Yes I realized early on that word would require an institutional word-license for viewing on the cloud (thus all course docs are both in pdf and word - easy enough for the 2 teachers/owners to export a pdf from within word once updated/edited - this course requires constant updating). 

However after a lot of ploughing through lynda moodle vids and other online resources, it seems pdf's and word docs uploaded to an activity such as a book/chapter/page etc still aren't viewable in-browser...

This is a major downside when you need some kind of overarching organizational format (we have around 7 main topics, several with 7-10 subtopics, each of which are comprised of anywhere from 2-10 lessons, each with corresponding word and pdf files as well as quizzes and media files). 

Pop-up functionality is pretty essential for students who will often be relying on ipads, tablets, mobile phones etc (not to mention, being forced to download and open in acrobat reader for every lecture is downright primitive).

Flattening the course structure just to enable popups or separate tabs entails creating 50+ 'topics' and no way to group them. 

I don't recall this problem using commercial solutions in undergrad or grad school (USyd, Cornell) whether it was blackboard or whatever it was we used back then. In fact I don't see why such an obvious shortcoming is such a problem for developers to address. 

It seems quite a few people out there on the great internet have resorted to hacking moodle source code to overcome this..! Not about to try, know some basic html and css, but that's as far as it goes.

My clients have access to Word and that is pretty much it. As far as effort, copying pasting text and illustrations/embedding media into pages using the wysiwig interface is a no go. They want to simply download word docs, edit, export as pdf, upload them again. Neither has the time or inclination to mess around with the atto editor.

Me adding html code to enable iframes or popups etc obviates the whole exercise, which is to keep this as simple as possible, and completely self-sufficient/self-reliant (no reliance on IT people...a 6th grader should be able to manage it).  Ditto they have no time to learn new software packages. I will have to teach them how to upload docs, and enroll students, but that is about as far as it goes ( I don't want to be tech support for the next decade either!).

Thanks for the replies, will have a play around with the books thing, but a bit disappointed frankly with the platform (lots of great stuff! but viewing docs inline not to mention a decent file management system seems pretty basic!).

Edit 5? 

How much is a plugin that enables docs to be read online going to cost (as far as I can tell, files sit on amazon servers or something), and will such a plugin (do they work for blocks or for main content as well?) work for files in my current folder/subfolder structure? 

Looked at renting at amazon for rendering, but not this kind of thing.