David Scotson

Note that Markdown offers two good ways to turn itself off when dealing with snippets_of_code:

indent_entire_line_by_four_spaces

or surround file_names_etc.php with backticks (`).

One problem is that Moodle uses the ADOdb library to connect to the various supported databases and I can't see Ingres on the following list of supported databases:

http://phplens.com/lens/adodb/docs-adodb.htm#drivers

I also found this comment on the ADOdb forums:

http://phplens.com/lens/lensforum/msgs.php?id=12194&x=1

I'm guessing that means an order of magnitude more work to support Ingres than MSSQL, though you may want to get that confirmed by someone who knows more about ADOdb and see whether trying 'odbc if all else fails' is a worthwhile strategy.

On the other hand you could view adoption of Moodle as the perfect opportunity to explore the possibilities of Postgres (or MySQL).

I've had some experience of this using IPA and old english unicode ranges. Unfortunately the answer isn't simple because of various browser incompatabilities.

The issues I remember off the top of my head:

• Moodle (when used in english) reports its character encoding as ISO-8859-1. If you want the user to enter into text entry area any character outside that range then browser support varies widely. I believe Internet Explorer and Firefox silently convert them to the numerically encoded version e.g. θɪŋ would display fine in the edit box, and probably (see next point) display fine to viewers but would become the numerically encoded equivalent (θɪŋ) in the edit box if you re-edit and, crucially, in the answers that students submit in response to questions. So the right answer would need to be numerically encoded for Moodle to correctly match them. (Though this won't work in Safari and I think Opera browsers, as it simply replaces characters with question marks if outside the pages character set).(edit: actually testing this right now with an up-to-date Firefox browser it appears to be automatically converting ampersand encoded characters in both directions, which it didn't do before)

• Mozilla, Safari and other sensible browsers will automatically fall back to any Unicode IPA characters it has in any installed fonts if it can't find the right character in the current font. Internet Explorer seemed to need the font to be specifically set (and that exact font has to be present on the viewers machine) or it won't display correctly.

• a javascript doo-dah would probably work well, having example characters to cut and paste would work too (within the constraints mentioned above)

• Moodle is currently moving towards using Unicode for all its english pages. I'd guess that would solve most of these problems.

Yes, sorry, I should have been more clear that I was summarising just the part of the thread on the topic of:

• Myth: you need a PHP programmer to run Moodle

which is kind of a subset of

• Myth: Open Source is always more difficult to install/use/administer

These are just two of the misleading things people might have heard when they first consider Moodle.

While I don't think it's particularly useful to gauge the usability of Open Source vs. Proprietary software in general, rather than on a specific product basis I'll note that Grebow's comments start with talking about the two products he works with (including Moodle) and then continues by addressing all the rest of his comments to Open Source LMSs in aggregate. A subtle, but possibly important difference may have been lost in the editing.

Note that he has on other occasions specifically mentioned the GUI of his Moodle-derived learning system as a positive asset:

At 8/04/2005 11:06 PM, David Grebow said...

Stephen, Ben et al.: I'm working as the CLO for an open source LMS -Moodle based but on steroids - and in the academic marketplace we're taking one customer a week away from eCollege, WebCy, Embanet and BlackBoard.

They cannot compete on price, fucntionality, features, security, no MSFT tax, runs on all platforms (Tiger OS thru Firefox), has a great GUI and oh yes did I mention price - about 70% LESS than the other vendors who provide less for more.

quoted from a Learning Circuits Blog comment