Developer conference May 2006
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Developer conferences > May 2006 conference notes
Moodle 1.6
Quiz
- Gustav Delius is handing over the Quiz module to the Open University on Tuesday 23rd May 2006
- Tim Hunt will be the main person working on quiz
- 1.6 quiz is much cleaner, set up for growth, enabling questions in different modules, developing assessment type using questions
- Comment from Mike Churchward: Hopefully more modules will use questions in future e.g. Questionnaire module
Themes
- 1.6 theme upgrade documentation
- Unfortunate that theme developments were reverted - better to have tested more before committing
- Currently problems with a "you are here" link and the jump link between blocks (see skip-block feature new in 1.6 forum discussion), images in navigation not so nice and the alternate icon set is incomplete
- Lots of deprecated tags still in 1.6 - these should be cleaned up for 1.7, using a page in Moodle Docs rather than the bug tracker
1.6 code
- Comment from Gustav Delius: Lots of different styles of code - difficult for newcomers to know what to copy
- Reply from Martin Dougiamas: Database module should be a good example with classes, plugins etc.
Release
- 1.6 should be released as soon as possible
- Petr currently working on security bugs
- The advice to backup everything before upgrading should be reinforced
- Big sites will take a long time to migrate the database to UTF-8
Moodle 1.7
Database schema
- Database support to be extended to SQL server and Oracle
- Single system, one file in xml format; things more automated and regular
- Explicit sql must be cleaned up, isolated in lib, pull out generalised sql and put in core file, may still need switch statements
- Eloy Lafuente (stronk7) working out the issues - see XML database schema
- Comments from Tim Hunt: datalib is big, getting even bigger, should we split? Should have unit testing for each database.
Roles and permissions
- permissions = capabilities
- The Open University (OU) have extended Martin and Shane's initial ideas
- Site, course and activity level roles
- Moodle HQ will do the work (funded by OU)
- Currently polishing the general spec, publishing it soon - see Roles
- Comments from Matt Oquist: OU proposal not generic enough, need ownership and permissions on a fine grained level, seems illogical to have separate permissions system for repository and roles - see Roles and Permissions architecture forum discussion
- Comment from Gustav: We should consider how Boddington handles roles - see flash movie demonstrating roles interface
Martin's comments
- Gradebook needs fixing (changing from 'pull' to 'push'), anyone interested please get in contact, would love it to be in 1.7
- Unfortunately dfwiki not in 1.6 - interface better but still needs work, hopefully it will be included in 1.7
- Please can everyone add hacks, plugins, modules etc. to the Modules and plugins database (just need to allow different people to edit database entries)
- SCORM 1.2 and AICC supported, but not yet SCORM 2004; new SCORM maintainer, Sadiel, a Moodle Partner