David Scotson

Looking at the code, all it appears to be doing is reading the first 200 characters and checking that the file starts with:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

and contains:

<MOODLE_BACKUP>

which

• I'm fairly certain my moodle.xml file does, and
• I'm not sure why simply unzipping and rezipping a file should change this test from true to false

Pretty much stumped now

I've tried to anonymize some course content by unzipping a backup, search and replacing through moodle.xml, and then zipping again.

This fails at the first hurdle with the message:

Error checking backup file. Invalid or corrupted.

In investigating this it turns out that simply unzipping and zipping the file (on either Windows XP or Mac OS X) is enough to stop the Moodle restore process from functioning.

I turned on debug but didn't get any more info.

Seaching the forum suggested that using the built in php zip routines might cause problems, switching them to use the ones supplied with Linux didn't seem to help.

Does anyone have any helpful suggestions?

I found this review of WYSIWYG editors interesting. It's a very specific review in that it rates them on the quality of the code they produce. JXHTMLEDIT did poorly, not because it didn't support the various types of code, but because it expected the user to understand and select the correct code themselves.

TinyMCE, which I think Janne has mentioned before in the context of Moodle integration, did quite well.

I had got the original email, just not had time to check it out till now, sorry.

After only a brief poke around I do have some preliminary questions:

• could the tests clean up after themselves automatically, by deleting any activities created during the test (and either testing that they've gone or using standard setup and teardown routines to ensure a consistent environment for each test)?
• to what extent do you think the cause of difficulties in testing is split between inherent problems with GUI testing / Selenium drawbacks / fixable Moodle HTML issues?
• what other functional testing tools are in the running for selection?
• what is the security issue with Selenium? Is it just to prevent people running scripts against test.moodle.com? Would it not be possible to run these tests against local installs of Moodle (if Selenium were set up on those servers too)?
• has any thought been given to running these tests directly from the MoodleDocs wiki? Sounds crazy I know, but there's a precedent in Fit and Fitnesse.
• have you been using the Selenium IDE or Remote Control?

I think it's looking very good, a comprehensive set of such tests would be an excellent resource for many reasons.

Good question. And I note someone else is asking the same thing.

I have also been looking for some clarity on this so I could add some structure to the wiki-related content on the MoodleDocs wiki, which I think should also perhaps cover wiki theory/philosophy in general in case people are working with 3rd party wiki's (e.g. Wikipedia) or wiki tools outwith Moodle, as well as reducing duplication in documenting these areas when writing more specific documentation for both dfwiki, and the standard erfurt based wiki.

I can at least offer a part answer on MediaWiki, which is the software used to power both Wikipedia and the MoodleDocs projects. I would guess that it is not suitable for use within Moodle as a resource because it was never designed for that purpose, and a fair bit of wrangling would be needed to make it fit in with the rest of the Moodle code.

There's been a couple of questions about Mediawiki/Moodle integration in this forum but I think they are a bit of a red herring in this context. What has been done is simply to link the user authentication systems so that a) automated spammers will find it more difficult to deface the MoodleDocs wiki, since it is no longer a standard installation and b) Moodle.org users will not need a new username and password to contribute to the wiki. This is only appropriate if you are envisaging one large wiki for your entire Moodle site, which sits outside/alongside the Moodle installation. The other two wiki options are structured as Moodle activities, and so you can have multiple independant wikis within each Moodle course.