Glossary of common terms

Fantastico is an automatic installer for open source scripts such as Moodle.

The effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction with which users can achieve tasks in a particular environment of a product. High usability means a system is: easy to learn and remember; efficient, visually pleasing and fun to use; and quick to recover from errors.

With software, the usability is very dependent on the interface.

In general an interface is the boundary across which two systems communicate. There are many software interfaces within Moodle, for example, such as the interface a module uses to communicate with the core product, or the interface used to send mail.

Usually, though, this term refers to the interface between software and human beings: the user interface. In Moodle, for example, this is what we see and click on in the web browser and in our mail programs, and it provides ways for us to access, understand and change the database at the heart of any Moodle site.

The design of such an interface requires collaboration between software developers and users to make it "user-friendly" (and maximise overall usability).

A very important requirement for interfaces is standardisation, which reduces the amount of learning that users need to do to explore the features in the software. Moodle has had informal standards in the past, but we are currently writing a more formal specification to help Moodle's many developers produce a more consistent interface, and remove some of the irregular, inefficient or hard-to-learn interfaces that have crept into various corners of Moodle.

With Moodle, interface issues should be discussed in the forums most appropriate to them - if you wish to raise discussion about an interface in the Chat module, use the Chat forum. If you have a specific bug or request to report, please use the bug tracker.

C is a medium-level programming language invented by Dennis Ritchie around 1973 at Bell Laboratories. Created to be the implementation language for the UNIX operating system, C went on to become one of the most widely-used programming languages worldwide in the 1980's, having been gradually supplanted for applications development both by its offspring C++ and Java and by scripting languages such as Perl, Python and PHP, the latter being the language that Moodle itself is written in.

UNIX is a computer operating system that originated around 1970 at Bell Laboratories and has been in continuous use and development since.
Linux is a rewrite of UNIX, whereas FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Mac OS X and Solaris, among others, are descendants of the original UNIX implementation.

Today UNIX and Linux run the majority of servers and other "infrastructure" on the Internet, but is also used on a lot of desktop systems (including Mac OS X, the #2 best-selling commercial operating system in the world).

The Moodle Partners are a group of companies affiliated with moodle.com who:

• Are very knowledgeable and supportive of the Moodle project
• Provide quality Moodle services such as hosting and consulting
• Support Moodle development directly via royalty payments
• Are often found around moodle.org, helping people for free

For more information about Partners (and perhaps even becoming one) see the moodle.com/partners site.

Abbreviation of EfurtWiki.

Moodle's wiki is based on ErfurtWiki, which is an implementation of the WikiWikiWeb hypertext system. It allows simple collaborative editing and creation of web pages.

For more about eWiki, see http://erfurtwiki.sourceforge.net/.

As Far As I Know

This is an abbreviation for 'Thanks in advance'

Often used in usenet but has become increasingly popular in e-mails, text messages, instant messages, chat rooms and forum posts. In fact, you could come across this abbreviation in any modern electronic communication.