David Scotson

Are you talking about the form in the middle, and the way it goes under the right hand column?

Firstly, have you tried this in standard theme?. Someone filed a bug about something either very similar (or identical) and it didn't work in Standard theme either (edit: just tried it, still cuts off for me in every theme I tried, but not as much in standard, or those that force the admin blocks to the right hand side. Afternburner has blocks on both sides and looks roughly the same.). A lot of Moodle's design decisions are made by people with very large monitors.

For more Boostrap specific info, by default Bootstrap has got a variable called horizontalComponentOffset which tells it how wide the label part of the form should be. I think it's 180px by default (160px for the label, 20px for the gutter). Moodle increased the default size by 20px, because Moodle has a lot of quite long label text. Then responsive CSS was added to further increase this label size as you increase the size of your monitor.

The Moodle Bootstrap theme then applies that code to 5 or 6 of the different form layouts in Moodle.

You could try to tweak this particular one with the following code:

.mform .fitem div.fitemtitle { width: 120px;}
.mform .fitem .felement { margin-left: 140px;}

but you'd probably want to a) restrict that to this particular page, and b) maybe use media queries so that it only applies at certain screen widths.

Another solution might be to force the blocks on the right to the other side, but i'm not sure how you'd do that from a theme.

I'm confused by how your response applies to the section you quote.

Your link seems to suggest that your plugin only supports 2 codecs, and while it advertises iPad support, that support will only work with one of the codecs. Which happens to be the same codec I recommended, and which works in all the other scenarios too, rendering the other codec superflous, even if it didn't have lower quality/higher file size.

So are we talking about codecs, or all the other features like playlists and whatnot? Because if we're still talking about codecs then by not standardizing on the one I mention, you're just complicating matters for no gain.

I fully agree that Moodle's multimedia handling is a bit rubbish, but if anyone is planning work to make it better then it would be a very good idea to focus on getting that one codec to work well. I'd be highly surprised if any other LMS/VLE platforms are doing anything else, because outside of tightly controlled intranets*, no other codec will even work.

* and just to be clear, it's still the best choice in tightly controlled intranets.

Hi Matt, fully agree that media servers are often entirely unnecessary, sticking the video file on a server is the simplest and easiest solution (other than, putting it on Youtube, anyway).

But, the codec wars are over. I personally would have prefered Theora or VP8 to win but H.264 video with AAC audio in an MP4 container won this decisively a while ago. There's no good reason to use anything else, and putting a link to that file in a video tag solves the basic problem for almost everyone. The only tricky bit is setting up a Flash fallback for IE8 and older Firefoxes, but it's getting to the stage where even a direct file link would be a sufficient fall-back for those platforms.

Regarding handing off files from Apache, I believe Moodle can use the x-send-file-for extension for this, but Googling for some info on that support didn't really bring up anything useful. It's almost certainly in there in some form though.

I'm curious about why you use Student role 99% of the time. Seems like that itself might be a bug that you've just become accustomed to, rather than something we should be making easier.

edit: Re-reading this, I think you're actually saying that *when* you change role, then 99% of the time it is to Student.

Which I think this is actually one of the core usability failures of Moodle. Originally you had Admin, Teacher and Student roles. Then in 1.7 an incredibly flexible "roles" system was introduced. I can't count the number of times I've thought of a better way to do something in the interface and then realised that you can't do it that way because Moodle no longer has separate, standard roles for Teacher and Student. Instead every decision is based on an entirely customizable list of roles, each of which has it's individual capabilities entirely customizable.

This is why you can't have a student view button anymore, I believe my colleague wrote the first one, and it did originally do exactly what you request, simply a button to switch to the standard student role. There was a bunch of other simple user interfaces that were removed at the same time as they were incompatible with the (mostly unnecessary) flexibility of roles.

This is the key point for me:

Stop looking for examples of best web practice in other vle and look for them on the web instead

In a discussion about docking blocks it was pointed out that basically no other website in the world had that user interface (though Photoshop does apparently). That should be a big red flag I think and a good rule of thumb for any new development.

More generally we also seem to have no process for handling change of any kind. "Different isn't always better, but better is always different", so how do we cope with changing Moodle? Because if we intend to improve it, then you're going to have to plan for change.