Developer meeting February 2008

Developer meetings > February 2008 meeting

The meeting was at 11pm GMT, Thursday 28 February 2008. We had 42 participants and we covered everything in around two hours.

• Recording of the meeting (password moodle).

Meeting notes to be finished soon!

Moodle 1.9

• Moodle 1.9 release

The release should be today, Petr fixed a serious security issue yesterday an upgrade is recommended. Thanks to everyone who has worked on 1.9, especially Petr.

• Major API changes

Everything documented in Moodle Docs. Martin D provided brief descriptions:

1. Grades - Grades from activities should be pushed into the gradebook using grade_update(). Interface wise, modified a lot based on feedback, Gary giving lots of reports, Helen and Nicolas cleaning up preferences and help. OU paid for most of the new gradebook including a custom report. Use the tracker to propose improvements.
2. Events - Events API unfinished, can be worked on in Moodle 2.0, lots of events triggers added in 1.9 (need to document them), only for external modules at the moment.
3. Groups (Petr) - Groups rewritten with new features added, such as groupings, implemented by Petr based on Enrique Castro's spec and earlier work by the Open University.
4. Tags - tags is a separate feature, any module can use it, tags can be attached to any element with an ID (course, user, module, tag), eventually, tags capability should be added to each core module, tag API has been changing a lot, Mathieu Petit-Clair has been getting it ready for 1.9, the tag library is much cleaner now, tag_set() and tag_get(), there are the 2 main API functions, comma-separated lists, with or without links, the tag page will need to be adjusted to display tags in a smarter way, 20 different styles used in tag clouds, For example you can search blogs by tags, Tag library: currently in /tag/moodle.php, may get moved to /tag/lib.php.
5. Roles - Roles API is much, much faster, Martin Langhoff has done a lot of performance work there, waiting for results on tests between 1.8 and 1.9, to check speed differences, white paper about Moodle running with 1 million concurrent users, due to be released, about 30-50% faster.

• Journal (see Death to Journal - maybe forum discussion)

Moodle 2.0

• Repository API

Martin D explained how we want to allow users to upload files into Moodle and bring content in from external repositories, not just teachers but anybody. The repository should be secure, so that only intended recipients can see the files. Whenever you reference a file externally, it will get copied into Moodle, with metadata about the file. 2 APIs: one for read-only stuff and another for write: push something out to Moodle. The draft Development:Repository_API is a "first cut".

• Portfolio API

Martin D described how little "Save this" buttons could be added in various places in Moodle. Data gets encapsulated with metadata and put into chosen portfolio (Mahara, hard drive etc).

• Conditional activities
• nWiki for Moodle 2.0
• Feedback module
• Turnitin Integration (Dan Marsden)
• Performance tips

• Hotpot module

Gordon Bateson is working hard on new version of Hotpot module (original version written for Moodle 1.4 when there were no objects in the Moodle code) to make use of new objects - forms, tables - and to be compatible with new grades features. The New Hotpot module enables people to administer quizzes made with any external quiz editor - Hot Potatoes, TextToys, Qedoc, ExamView quizzes etc. Teachers can create quizzes using the quiz software then play them in Moodle using the HotPot module. Hotpot module new features: single Hotpot activity will encompass a collection of quizzes, caching, pre and post conditions on quiz results similar to lesson module, lots of other little things e.g. media players in quizzes. The new Hotpot module doesn't use Moodle questions currently, though this is a possibility for the future. The new Hotpot module will have an open source core (available through Moodle) and a closed source commercial side called Hotpot Pro to include various add-ons. Hotpot Pro will provide funding for continuing Hotpot module development.

Other stuff

• Moodle bugathon

Results announcement - see Bugathon prize winners. Thanks to Bryan Williams of Remote-Learner.net for donating the iPods. Congratulations to all our prize winners and a big thank you to everyone who took part in the bugathon. It was suggested that we have a shorter bugathon (e.g. 1 month) before the next major release.

• Google Highly Open Participation contest report

Helen reported that the GHOP contest was a great success! The contest gave students aged 13-18 the chance to learn more about and contribute to many aspects of open source software development. To quote from a contest participant: "I always thought you had to know PHP to be able to contribute to Moodle development. Now I know that it's not true - there are many other ways of contributing." Around 100 tasks were completed by 50 students. Wide variety of tasks including lots of video tutorials explaining 1.9 features, a new language pack (Latin), selenium scripts, XMLDB developer documentation and database presets - see GHOP/2008 for the full list. A big THANK YOU to everyone who helped reviewing tasks and suggesting new ones. Hopefully Moodle will be involved in the GHOP contest next year, assuming Google decide to run it again.

• Google Summer of Code

Helen described how Moodle has been involved in GSOC for 2 years now, since 2006. The GSOC program pays university students to work on open source software products for about three months (over the northern hemisphere summer), mentored by existing developers. Previous projects include social networking features (resulting in tags in 1.9) and user management improvements (resulting in bulk user actions in 1.9) - see GSOC for the full list. We're going to apply to be included in GSOC 2008 next week. Assuming we're accepted, we need to come up with a list of suggested student projects ASAP, together with developers willing to mentor them. Students will then browse the list of projects, discuss them in the student projects forum and apply by 31st March 2008. Anyone willing to mentor a project, please let Helen know. Mentor commitment: up to 5 hours per student per week. Even if you’re not able to mentor a project, you can still help and support GSOC students by answering their questions in the forums, giving feedback etc.

• How to write a good bug report The Tracker page on the docs.moodle.org has been updated (https://docs.moodle.org/en/Tracker), let's try to write good bug reports that would eventually save Martin (and other developers) a lot of time (to read and understand the bug reports...etc.)
• Introducing Contrib Coordinator
• Testing Moodle - do we need a more coordinated approach with people responsible for modules (see more comments on this page by Gary)
• Unmaintained modules - we could really use maintainers for them
• Other infrastructure, communication, and workflow related issues?

See also

• Roadmap