Tim Hunt

Disabled in a new thing, and I am not going to do it. I don't what this change to start feature-creeping. I think that my change does not make it any easier or hard to implement a disabled mode later.

Do you mean that if I have a stealthed activity and a bunch of other activities/resources with the stealthed activity as their parent, the children automatically take on the state of the parent? That would be very useful and less error-prone then requiring related activities to have their dates of availability set independently.

I think you may be misunderstanding how this will work.

To start with, an activity is stealthed if, and only if, it has a parent assigned.

And, I'm afraid childres will not take any state from their parents. The only thing they will get from their parents is th navigation trail.

This is partly because of Wen Hao question about performance. If state was inerited from the parent activity, then whenever you wanted to know about that state, you would have to pull more records from the database. With my proposal, any decision about access to a module is made just on the basis of the settings for that module. That is a trade off - it makes it easier for teachers to check how their course is set up, and easier to implement, but it means slightly more manual effort to create the course.

Wen Hao, to finish answering your question about performace, I think the performance impact will be minimal. It will be one or two more if statments in the existing code, and at most one more database query on some pages - when calling build_navigation for an activity with a parent.

I disagree with your first point for two reasons. If it is confusing for teachers when stealth activities are hidden, then it will probably be confusing for students too. Also, when students and teachers are talking about the site, it helps if what the teacher and student sees is similar when just looking at the site. I know, the teacher can always change role to student, but really, we don't want two separate views of a course, we want one view that all participants share. It is just that the teacher view may have a few more controls in areas like the admin block. In think this common understanding of what the course is is consistent with http://docs.moodle.org/en/Pedagogy

The second reason I disagree with your first point is practical. At the moment, and the code for creating and ordering resources assumes that resources are on the course page. So we have to list the activities there for them to be edited. Also, how are we going to define 'teacher' and 'student' in a Roles and Capabilities world? Well, we already have the two states for a course: editing on and editing off, and we are only showing these activities to be editable, so it makes sense to me to only show them when editing is on.

I'll reply to your second point in a second post, in case the two sub-threads of conversation head in different directions.

I'm afraid I know virtually nothing about the existing conditional activities stuff that is available as patches to current versions of Moodle, nor about the specific plans for 2.0. So I really cannot comment.

I am just proposing some specific changes, with details of how I would implement them. Hopefully someone who does know about conditional activities can read my plans, and comment on whether what I propose makes conditional activities harder or easier to implement. I hope the latter.

Well, Cloze questions are one of the most complicated question types, so it is not impossible. And if the memory ran out half way through saving the question, that might result in a corrupted question. But it will need investigation to find out for sure. Sorry I can't be more helpful.