Approval issue created: CONTRIB-7755

Dear Stefan,

I like the kick start format and bought the pro version for our Moodle platform. It is a pitty that nothing was translated to German, although you are a german speaking guy and you sell the pro version as german company. As the local_kickstart_pro-Plugin cannot be translated using AMOS, I will give you the translation for this below. The translation of 6 Strings would not have been very hard for you. I translated the free part of your plugin using AMOS too, because without this we could not expect our users to work well with that function.

I have to say, that it is a shame for a Crippleware-Plugin with Pro-Option, that no translations are shipped - at least the most important languages (I would consider German to be one of those) should be included. I was rather upset to have to translate it myself.

By the way, my first attempt to contact your company was in the Helpforum of your Plugin's Website (https://kickstart.bdecent.de/mod/forum/view.php). It seems the Forum there is a newsforum - users have no permissions to post anything. This is not very helpful for a Helpforum.

Regards
Robert

PS: here the 6 strings. Would not have been hard to ship them with the Pro-Plugin!

$string['kickstart_pro:import_other_courses'] = 'Aus einem anderen Kurs importieren';
$string['moreresults'] = 'Es gibt noch mehr Suchergebnisse. Bitte grenzen Sie die Suche ein!';
$string['pluginname'] = 'Kickstart Pro';
$string['showing'] = 'Zeige {$a->count} Kurs(e))';
$string['staffonthiscourse'] = 'Mitarbeiter/innen dieser Kursvorlage';
$string['welcometo'] = 'Willkommen bei';

Dear Robert,

thank you for your feedback. Glad you like our plugin.
Here are may comments/answers:

= Translations =
We do focus on the international market; we happen to be based in Germany, but only a fraction of our customers are Germans, therefor we think/thought that focussing on improving the plugin itself and implementing new features is the better choice. Sure, we could have added German translations, you're right. It just never came to our mind to be perfectly honest with you, because we never advertised that it is available in any language.
Our policy is to add all required strings (also for pro) to the free version, in order to make use of AMOS. I've already tasked my developer to add the few you've found there – there are a lot more which already can be translated, we just missed those. (well except for the pluginname, that is mandatory, i.e. we won't be able to translate it, which should not be a problem though)
Thank you for contributing the strings back to us – and of course thank you also for contributing the translations to AMOS. We'll introduce a program soon to thank language contributors (I have a coupon in my mind), and I'm more than happy to provide one for you as well. I'll send it to you once we've figured out the details)

= Help Forum =
I forgot to change the role on the frontpage, that's now fixed. Thanks for reporting that, too.

= Pro Plugins =
It is not (yet) common that plugins are not totally free, and given the open source nature and the community efforts, I do understand that it's something not everybody likes. We believe that our "freemium" approach is an appropriate model. Contribute a free version to the community for free (and maintain it), and have more advanced features only available for paying customers. We do try to find the right balance that the free version is valuable – and the feedback so far has always been very positive. The core of kickstart is to provide a super simple way to implement templates in moodle. And that's free for up to 4 templates (we've increased it in 1.1, it used to be 3).

Best
Stefan

Are you planning to implement dates..it would be nice if we could set the course start date and all activities would adjust automatically...

Hi Emma,

Can you explain in more detail how you’d like it to work? I assume you want relative/dynamic dates for activities, right? Haven’t thought about doing that within kickstart, but happy to explore it if you see a need for that!

In the meantime, maybe have a look at the upcoming release of learning tools, specifically the “time management”. Essentially, what it does is implement dynamic start and due dates for activities, which then show up on the timeline block and in our designer format.

You can test it on our demo site labs.bdecent.de - create a course, add a few activities, then click on the magic wand and pick the time management tool. There, click in manage dates in the top right. You might want to switch to the designer course format to see the integration we built for it.

Any questions, let me know, ideally on chat.bdecent.de.

Hope this helps
Stefan

Hello Kickstart team, when this format will be suitable for 4.2?