Student projects/Admin page cleanup

I'm currently working on porting the settings to XML and putting together the new index.php admin page. Please use the talk page to leave me any comments, I'll be checking it regularly.

Before looking at source code, please run this script to update .phps files

Key Project Tasks

• (almost done -- 1 issue remaining) Design XML DTD
• (almost done -- 1 issue remaining) Design new admin block
• (in progress) Reorganize and port Moodle admin settings to XML
• (in progress) Code script for displaying and accepting input from new admin interface (based on XML)
• (not yet started) Build a per-user bookmarking system for admin settings
• (not yet started) Redo the user management interface
• (not yet started) Code the necessary PHP to highlight changed settings after an upgrade

Random Notes

• I mentioned (in my proposal) using XML to store the hierarchy. I still think this is ideal (after all, XML seems to lend itself to hierarchical data), but I think there are a few ways to expand this. Notably, along with the settings, we can store

1. whether a setting should appear on the initial (installation) config page (granted, this'll require a rewrite or modification of the initial config page)
2. if a new setting has been set to the default because of an upgrade, then we can have a config page that appears when upgrading which shows only the flagged, new variables (i.e. those that were set to defaults)

• Site settings and editor settings could be grouped together (but I won't jumble up settings between the two of them; they'll just have the same parent in the hierarchy).
• Logs and Site Files sections look good as-is... probably won't make very many changes there
• Will try to improve on course administration interface (ideas to come soon)
• (Sort of) redo the user management interface so that we can get rid of the "Assign Teachers", "Assign Admins", etc. options on the main admin page (i.e. have a single link to a "User Management Interface" and do everything else from there.
• Group Modules, Filters, and Blocks (and other 16 types of plugins) under a top-level category called Plug-Ins (similar to the way it's done on moodle.org)
• Will probably use the PHP SimpleXML extension for reading XML files; variable data will be stored in current locations, not in XML, thus no XML changes will be made by PHP

Links

• Get back to the Student Projects listing.
• You can get my official SoC app here.
• My sample moodle setups are here for 1.5 and here for 1.6.
• A beta hierarchy script (actually, a PHP hierarchy object) that I created for this is available here.
• Useful link for me to learn about module programming.