Tim Hunt

From one of the other threads I read, I think the way to do 'stealth' activities currently is this:

Suppose your course will eventually have 4 topics, create the course with 5 topics, add the stealthed activities to topic 5, then change the course settings to have 4 topics. Now the stealted activities are not visible on the course page, but are accessible to students.

I agree, that this was probably not an intentional feature, and my way of achieving the result more explicitly is probably better.

Stealth mode is something we developed in house at the OU. It has been taked about in several threads in this forum. In the past, we have offered it to the community, but Martin has been reluctant to let it go into core Moodle.

Now, I am about to implement a new, improved version of stealth mode in OU Moodle, so I thought once again I thought I would offer it to core Moodle. To this end, I have just written the design document on Moodle Docs.

http://docs.moodle.org/en/Development:Stealth_mode_and_nested_activities

Does this look solid? Have I forgotten anything?

Also, would this be useful to you in your courses? If so, say so here. I am sure Martin will take everyone's views into account when he considers this. (Martin, no need for you to consider this until after 1.9 is out of the door.)

The new gradebook in Moodle 1.9 may let you do this, but being new, not many people know all the things it is capable of yet.

Yes, that query is right.

Running the query will slow things down a little bit, but it will probably be a very little bit, so no one will notice. Doing that export will probably only take a second or two.

You really don't want a diagram of the the whole Moodle database. There are over 100 tables. More to the point, the database is pretty modular. There are about a dozen core tables, which are quite inter-linked. Then all the other tables belong to different modules, and are really quite distinct. For example, there are about half-a-dozen forum tables, a bunch of quiz and question bank tables, and so on.

You really want to be able to understand it one chunk at a time. What we need is more diagrams like this: http://docs.moodle.org/en/Development:Quiz_database_structure. I keep meaning to get around to drawing the core tables, but not having time.

These are what I consider to be the core tables, split into clumps:

config - configuration
config_plugins

user - users
user_info_category
user_info_field
user_info_data
user_lastaccess
user_preferences
user_private_key

role - roles and capabilites system
capabilites
context
role_allow_assign
role_allow_override
role_assignments
role_capabilities
role_names
role_sortorder

course - courses and their categoriesation
course_categories
course_display
course_meta
course_request

module - activities and their arrangement in courses
course_allowed_modules
course_modules
course_sections

groups - groups system
groups_memebers
groupings
groupings_groups

log - the logging system
log_display

scale - miscellaneous
sessions2
timezone

Wow! that is more than I thought. Of course, I left out some clumps like the block*, backup*, stats* and grade* tables, which some would consider to be parts of core, while I included the groups* ones. Anyway, I think it would be most useful to diagram these one clump at a time - though of course showing links out to tables in other clumps, like I did in the quiz diagram.