Moodle Vanguard : Weblog

Motoring on Moodle

Thu, 31 Jul 2008 20:42:20 GMT

Alexei Sayle made a rap record in the 80s called ello John, gotta new motor where he dances all around a Ford Cortina mk IV!

Anyhow, I've been motoring along with Moodle 1.9.2 and getting things ready for the new semester. Here'sthe modules I'm going for:

Course Menu block. This is totally brill and I'm sure faculty will love it.
Attendance. Did this last year and I think more will be interested.
Feedback. I'm not going to make a big hullabaloo about this but it's there.
Book. Back by request.

What I'm not going to put into production right away but will install on a test system is:

Nanogong. Crude but effective?
Different course formats -- the biggie here is Flexible Page Format.

I've been testing these out on a CVS test system and tomorrow I shall download the latest freshest 1.9.2 available and use that for my initial system.

Blogging my Moodle bugs

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 15:15:49 GMT

I've been blogging about the Moodle 1.9 bugs that I've been finding and squashing during our run up to deploying 1.9 on campus. Rather than recreate all those posts here, I'll just point you to my edublogs blog (which I'm also using as a testbed for WordPress Mu, which we'll be experimenting with here at Lafayette later this year):

http://knewquist.edublogs.org/tag/moodle19+bugs/

So far I've got six bugs chronicled, with patches for most of them available in tracker (or about to be rolled into core).

Blocks

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 14:19:56 GMT

I have a funny story that involves "blocks". When I first came to the United States of America way back in 1986 I visited Washington DC with a Dutch acquaintance. We were a bit lost and struggling to find a museum (where are the signposts???) so I asked a passerby in my best English accent "Is the museum near by?" Blank stare. "Is it a couple of blocks away?", I persisted. "Whaaat?", was the reply. At this point my friend, Jan, interjected, "I think he means 'blaaacks' ". "Oh, 'blaaaaaacks'!", she replied, " Yes, it's two blaaacks down the road".

The UK and the US -- so near and yet so far. Separated by a common language they say :-)

Block configuration

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 14:10:10 GMT

I've been pushing folks here to format their Moodle courses with 2 columns (ie a column of blocks and the Outline) rather than the default three (blocks, Outline, blocks). In order to further this aim, I'd like to:

Make the default configuration for new courses have a single column of blocks.
Have the "Blocks" block appear on the left side rather than the right side.

I should add that I have tried setting the arrangement of default blocks in the config.php but I found to my dismay that when I did so the News forum disappeared (but I don't recall reporting this or adding it to the Tracker -- ).
Any ideas about making these adjustments?

Moodle install -- U turn time

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 20:51:45 GMT

Having sworn in the previous post that I would not use CVS I diddled about with it this afternoon and found that it weren't so bad.

Following destructions on the CVS for admins page I was able to get things to work. Frumentius has all it's ports blocked except 80 so I figured I'd use Barnabas for development and then port things over as they solidify.

Commands:

Install CVS : sudo apt-get install cvs
Login to the CVS server : cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@us2.cvs.moodle.org:/cvsroot/moodle login
Create a directory to put it in : mkdir moodle_cvs
download the weekly update : cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@us2.cvs.moodle.org:/cvsroot/moodle co -d moodle_cvs -P -r MOODLE_19_WEEKLY moodle

At this point I figured I'd get some modules from contrib. But I quickly realised that I didn't want the whole shooting match. So I browsed to the CVS site : http://us2.cvs.moodle.org and dug down until I found the directory I was interested in (mod/attendance). Now I could get just the modules or blocks I'm interested in:

$ mkdir moodle_contrib
$ cd moodle_contrib
$ cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@us2.cvs.moodle.org:/cvsroot/moodle -d moodle_contrib/ co 
contrib/plugins/mod/attendance

Cool, eh?
Now, all I need to do is :

copy moodle_cvs into the server web space and copy the modules I want into their appropriate places.
Hack away, apply themes, customize, etc
In a month's time, update the CVS, and then do a diff between the working version and the CVS version and copy the changed files. If any of these have been hacked I will see straight away and can reapply the requisite changes.

New moodle install -- what's the best way?

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 16:31:16 GMT

Here's a conundrum about which folks may have some useful comments to make. I want to set up a new moodle instance, apply some needed hacks (ie ATwyatt's mega-useful hacks that I used last year — go to the link and scroll down to the entry for June 20th 07) install some modules and then test it out with course backups from last year's courses. So far, so good. But then having done all this I really want to use this particular installation as the production code. In and of itself this is no problem — just tar-gzip the code and copy it into the production location. But the catch then becomes how should I do the initial install?

I could download the latest stable build which is advertised as the best choice for a new server!. This apparently applies all the latest bug fixes but no new features. So, if I do this today I freeze the code at the state it was on July 1 2008. But since I'm going live in mid-August, what about all the bug fixes in the 6-7 weeks between now and then?

Another possibility is to use the CVS download and update this in the interim. But the problem here is that :

I've been bitten by CVS updates screwing over working installations and having to clean up the mess.
Making sure CVS updates don't overwrite your hacks is a pain

I ran into the same issue with Elgg and came up with this procedure which essentially enables me to update only non-hacked code with bug fix updates. However, Elgg uses SVN and I'm not sure that the same process could be applied to Moodle with CVS.

So I'd be interested to hear how folks are tackling this issue. Normally, I'm dead keen to get as bug free a version as possible as the basis for my production Moodle. After all, this code will have to last untouched for at least a semester. However, my experience is that 95% of the bug fixes would not affect my users. OTOH when you order the bug fixes in priority order for Issue Navigator — 1.9.x resolved you'll see the so-called blockers at the top. Currently the only bug that would really screw me over if it weren't fixed is MDL-13866 "scale ratings do not work in forum".

MoodleMoot Oklahoma: 2008

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 21:38:42 GMT

The MoodleMoot in Oklahoma, sponsored by Metrotech, was a good conference. I met John Isner, Jonathan Moore, and Anthony Borrow. I already knew Matt Campbell and Michelle Moore, and I was glad to see them again. I saw Nicholas Connault and Martin Dougiamas on Elluminate, but missed Helen. She was on at the same time I was giving a presentation, so I was disappointed!

With respect to Martin's presentation, we heard some interesting information about the roadmap and some general statistics about how moodle was used, growth patterns, etc. I just thought it was interesting to see him and hear his voice. I was glad to get a little more info on 2.0.

We got an important heads-up from Anthony Borrow. Moodle 2.0 will be using some new libraries that will require some re-writes of 3rd party plugins. Since some are not as well maintained as others, there is a potential for affecting a lot of moodle sites around the world. Anthony did say that he did not think the required alterations would be extensive. We depend on the maintainers at our institution, not having an in-house developer, so we will be watching this issue with a keen eye.

I saw a copy of John Isner's new book on roles management. I am not sure it is available yet, but will post here when it is. I would expect it to be an excellent resource. We are not too into roles, since we don't use much/any other than default. But that is something we might want to experiment with.

I think our big interest this year is going to be outcomes. We will have to figure out how to get sitewide data out of it through queries to the database. Moodle has few reporting tools at this time. I might mess around with myodbc. I don't know how to use it, but I should learn!!

Two posts about the moot on my blog:

This wasn't part of the conference, but I noticed that Dmitry has recently released a 1.9 attendance. You might want to take a look. That is a 3rd party block that we want to continue to use. We will be installing and bug testing on the 1.9 server between now and August.

Ramping up for Moodle 1.9

Fri, 16 May 2008 15:37:09 GMT

Personally, I have been rather quiet on the Moodle front even though version 1.9 has been released after extensive beta testing -- hurrah! This is not from sloth -- I've been working on Elgg for Earlham which I am (provisionally) calling 'Earlham Learning Spaces (ELS)'. I'm not sure how to "brand' this. When we introduced Moodle we didn't attempt to call it 'Earlham Course Management' or anything like that, though I know that some colleges have applied their own moniker -- we just went with 'Moodle' and it's branded itself. However, the concept of course management system or, as they say in Britain, 'Virtual Learning System' (do the practicioners learn 'virtually'?), is fairly accessible to teaching faculty or at least it's easy to comprehend. However, how do you explain elgg? It's a lot more than just a blogging system. I don't see Elgg as overlapping or competing with Moodle (but implementation of eportfolios has me wondering ...) -- more on this anon. Talking of branding Moodle, my mate at the College of Wooster where they use a moniker 'COW' wanted to call his new Moodle install "MooCOW" :-). I thought that this was a brilliant masterstroke but as expected the idea was squashed (too many opportunities for punning I guess).

The NITLE Moodle User's group is rapidly approaching -- I hope to be able to post some stuff here about what happened there. Also, it would be good to hear reports from various Moodle Moots around the country that I know are going on this summer (eg Oaklahoma, San Francisco).

Powerpoints in IE7 load with a blank white slide

Wed, 16 Jan 2008 16:22:10 GMT

We are still struggling with the powerpoint problem loading a blank white slide in IE7. I really think this is a browser problem, and I had hoped it would disappear with the first service pack. We still seem to have the problem! This is how I will attempt to fix the problem:

resource.class.php

605-616 in my file, because I added some comments.

echo '';
echo "

($fullurl)

";
}

//add this code to force download string to be appended to all ppt resources
//because IE7 will only show a single blank slide when linking to a presentation
if($mimetype=="application/vnd.ms-powerpoint") {
$fullurl=$fullurl."?forcedownload=1";
}

redirect($fullurl);
}

References:

Essentially, this method can be realized manually by adding
?forcedownload=1

To the end of every url as you link the resource in moodle. The problem with that method is that it requires a lot of work if you have to do it to very many powerpoint links.

One of our faculty members might have figured out another fix:

"Need to add moodle.mcm.edu to Internet Explorer's trusted sites. Just allowing it to download the file results in the single blank page issue. "

Security, Site Policies, maxbytes

Wed, 16 Jan 2008 15:10:30 GMT

Just a word of wisdom!

Do not mess up the maxbytes setting in security > site policies "Maximum uploaded file size"

This value should be the calculated number of bytes that corresponds to your maximum upload size. If you don't get this number right, then all assignments created while the setting is incorrect will reflect the incorrect limit. Usually, however, the upload size can be reset to force a database change. For example, I reset to 2MB, saved, and then reset back to 32MB. Most of our instructors simply use the default setting.

Another "Duh!" for me. . . Carelessness, of course.