Moodle plugins directory: Page format | Moodle.org
Page format
Other tools ::: format_page
Maintained by 
Valery Fremaux
Part of set Page Course Format.
the "page format" is a very flexible course format allowing building a hierarchical course with nested pages organisation and a totally floxeible way of compositing the course with blocs and activities placed anywhere in the three-or-less-columns layout.
Additionnally it proposes a new richer way to integrate activities in course, with "alternate views" that changes the historical [ "icon" + Link ] display. Some standard activities will have some alternate available views, and we still receive suggestions about how could some activites have an "enriched" display in the course pages.
The page format is now maintained by ActiveProLearn (France)
Latest release:
32 sites
14 downloads
24 fans
Current versions available: 7
IMPORTANT NOTE FOR PLUGIN ARCHIVE AVAILABILITY
: due to the large amount of plugins supported, it is NOT affordable
for us to update moodle.org packages. Please use the Source Control urls
to our github to get plugins archives.
This format has been used in big size project in France (Perform@nce, Ministry of Education with Intel support, is adopted in Rectorat de Strasbourg and recently the france southern region Provence Alpes Côte d'Azur for secondary education.
Provides several enhancements over the historical 1.9 flexpage version :
- Easy move of widgets all around the layout
- Easy page duplication
- Easy page reorder with graphical treeview
- Enhanced access control : Public external access pages
- Enhanced access control : Teachers reserved pages (hidden but published)
- Enhanced access control : Students published pages
- Enhanced access control : Activity score conditional page
- Layout enhancement : Page override by another activity module
- Individualisation : User specific pages
- Individualisation : Group specific pages
- Individualisation : With page_module new structure, indivualize each widget per user (expermiental)
- Page side comment pages fot teachers
Strong dependencies:
- You NEED the block page_module being installed for the page format to work
- You NEED customscripts to be activated, and provided customscripts to be settled
- Standard Moodle have a protection to not set a module in several sections of the course (not consistant in standard course formats). Page format needs this restriction to be overriden. A singleline impact point patch is provided in the distribution.
- You SHOULD choose one of block page_tracker (Learning Stations)
- The original pagemenu course module is OBSOLETE and ils NOT any more maintained.
What other components are Page format aware:
- The use_stats (block) and trainingsessions (report) know about page format. They can provide a course report time tracking presenting the guessed course structure based on page format organisation.
- The (future publication, based in checklist) learningtimecheck module and report are aware of page format, and will propose to work in a page or page tree scope (in addition to section and course scope as for standard formats)
Screenshots
Contributors
Valery Fremaux (Lead maintainer)
Please login to view contributors details and/or to contact them
Comments 
Comments
Please login to post comments
We should publish this soon.
Is the __goodies folder necessary for the plugin to work?
it would be better to refactor these into separate plugins that are specified as 'required' within version.php
At the moment, the way it is now with stuff under __goodies, it will cause upgrade path issues. If needed, please create MDL issues to help improve modularity in core moodle.
Relative to set : gonna see what i can see from here and tell you
task. As additional manual steps are required, we should not really display
the "Install" button for none of these Page set plugins. We will need to
improve the Plugins directory code so we are able to disable this feature from
selected plugins (once we have that, we can move your VMoodle block to the
appropriate category again, by the way). Note that we generally discourage
form solutions that require post-installation hacks like this. We try hard to
make plugins installation and updates as automatic as possible for good
reasons.
I must admit I'm not a big fan of solutions based on custom scripts as they
can easily take the whole site into a problematic state (e.g. when the
original script is updated during the regular Moodle upgrade or if a security
related issue is fixed in some overridden native script). That feature was not
really intended to be (ab)used by distributed plugins.
I would like to hear more on relation between this Page format and the
Flexpage format by Moodlerooms (which is already present in the Plugins
directory). Was their 1.x version just a conceptual inspiration or was some
code actually re-used?
Please note there is nothing like @reauthor doc tag supported. Author names
can be mentioned in the @copyright tag. But that has nothing to do with giving
the credit. It's there purely for legal reasons as the original file author
holds the copyright (copyleft) and is the one who ignites the GPL viral
behaviour.
The installation instructions in the README.txt file needs probably a
revision. They mention to rename the format_page folder that is not present in
the ZIP now. The /local folder is not recommended location for
$CFG->customscripts any more as it became the root of the new plugin type. I
understood - on contrary to what instructions say, that all the __goodies are
to placed as custom scripts. Am I right?
I noticed that the recommended boilerplate was not used in many files
file. The boilerplate is recommended at the beginning of each file and makes
explicit the GPL license. You may want to review
http://docs.moodle.org/dev/Coding_style#Files to learn more about the
boilerplate comments.
Please note that overall coding style is currently far far away from
recommended Moodle's coding style as outlined in
http://docs.moodle.org/dev/Coding_style and http://docs.moodle.org/dev/Coding
This makes the code review much less funny job than it could be and does not
put a good light on the product itself. Masterpiece plugins are great in
details such as the coding style, too. The code checker plugin can be quite
helpful in fine tuning your code and can be found at:
https://moodle.org/plugins/view.php?plugin=local_codechecker You may wish to
consider using that tool to further improve your plugin.
For now, I am going to mark all the plugins in the set as needing more work
until we get these issues resolved. Thanks for your patience with the review
and approval process.
first let me thank you for your deep analysis. It may be the first time in ten years of continuous developement over Moodle i get such a core view return.
About remarks :
Automated install : I'm really sure to NEVER enable this in my moodles. Although the contrib review process is really improving and leading to more quality, i'm getting convinced that there is no real way to avoid completely regression risks in an open widely contributed technology...
Customscript : i totally agree with you. Customscript is the very last extremity i use when all other architectural core sidepath attempts have failed. In that case, the page-format routing was really untweakable in core.
I was wondering how to deal with local/customscripts collision. I think you gave me the way to some better solution. I will rework in that diretion to remove this old practice in all my instances and projects.
Related to Page/Flexpage : Things are gone a very different way between both : Page format redraw is really based on Flexpage1.9 original structure and code, but was intended to :
- Provide content reuse of a lo of old flexpage based content on 1.9 programs
- Avoid using a proprietary, opaque coded framework (mr)
- Try to enhance the "page in theme" integration, not trivial in new Flexpage and forcing to draw a special integration for each theme instance being used. (Page just adds page formats to existing theme and that's all)
- Keep the simple concept of three columns
- Add a LOT of new features and author tools to improve productivity
- Add a lot of improvement and flexibility around content individualiation, page control.
As a result, the Page format can now superseed most of pedagogic strategies that were needing external authoring tool and using the poorly featured intermediate scorm format. In other words, we can now build very scorm similar sequenced content only with native Moodle contents and activities.
Code strictness : I will improve the check of the code to get it more accurate. This is one of my constant effort, but being damped by daily charge and a lot of plugins/versions to handle (and with such indirect funding for it of course). Code checker is a good idea. By the way, reviewing a lot of contribs, i'm not sure i am the furthest people from Moodle standards
Cheers ! work in progress...
thanks for your constructive reply and understanding my point of view.
WRT the automatic install, there is also an alternative way we could proceed. Instead of a set for your plugins,
we could make a subcategory below the Others category and put all Page related plugins there. We would make sure
that the category description contains a warning that installation of these plugins require special attention and
manual steps when integrating them to a site. So it would allow both making your valuable work published as well
as protect those who use the auto-installation and auto-updates feature from unexpected results.
I am aware of your issues with making your code working with the standard core files and I am happy you understand
that customscripts should really be used as a last attempt. In fact, I would personally prefer set of patches
(in .diff format) that must be applied to the core to make it work. You may consider that as an alternative if
required changes were not that big. Anyway, I understood you would try and re-implement your code so that it
does not rely on this. Let's see if you find it doable.
Thanks for the explanation of the relation to the Flexpage. It helps me to understand the context of your project.
And of course. The note about the coding style was really meant as a suggestion for eventual improvements. We do not
generally discriminate because of it. And as you correctly noted, the Plugins directory contains much more "creative"
code, indeed
Moodle developers, which is important for its further maintenance and bug fixing. I definitely did not mean it as
a show stopper, sorry if it sounded like that.
Looking forward to hearing from you and to re-review you work.
A Huuuuge code review has been performed on all Page format components in all >= 2.4 versions with a meticulous reformatting, and solving the installation proposal avoiding to confuse the local folder.
cheers !
problems during the installation (regardless what you personally think about auto-install and auto-update features, there are people
out there relying on it).
Let me suggest to review the README file in details. There are quite misleading instructions such as "Get the theme/page in the
__theme folder of the distributrion and copy the layout/page.php into your working format". I must admit I did not get too far when
trying to test this plugin. I gave up trying to understand what "Open the config.php file of the format page, and copy the layout
definitions into you current theme configuration" was supposed to mean.
Anyway, you are cleared to land now on the Others runway. I am sure there are sites that will be happy with your plugin - regardless
all the risks caused by custom scripts and non-trivial setup procedure. Wish you luck with maintaining this, it won't be easy task.
This course format seems wonderful! Thanks!
I've installed the complete plugin set and added the page layout and custom scripts flawlessly.
However, when I change a course format to "Page", I'm asked to create a new page (I think this is normal since I don't have a page at this level). But when it doesn't work when I enter the needed information and submit.
I'm just brought back to the page creation form and get no error message whatsoever, even when turning on the extra debug info.
I'm running Moodle 2.7 under IIS 7.5 and SQL Server 2008. Could it be a incompatibility with the DB engine?
Thanks for your feedback.