Developer conference April 2007

Developer conferences > April 2007 conference notes

The conference time was at 11am GMT, Friday 20th April. We had 32 participants and we covered everything in just over two hours! I think most people got something useful out of it.

Notes added afterwards by Tim. The are mostly very brief, and consist of links to where information has been posted. I hope this is helpful.Tim Hunt 03:08, 23 April 2007 (CDT)

Moodle 1.8

Some things that need to be taken into account for all new development:

• Accessibility Compliance
• XHTML Strict 1.0

These two are closely related. Accessibility is important so that as many people as possible can participate in Moodle courses, and also because there are now legislative requriements in many coutries. Ensuring that your pages validate as XHTML1.0 Strict is a very good start. Martin D recommended two firefox plugins that are a big help are Firebug and HTML Validator. Nick F recommended the Fange screenreader emulator.

• Forms Library

Also part of the accessibility work, but also makes forms easier for developers to create, and more consistent and usable for users.

Moodle 1.9

• Development:Events

This is the biggest new architectural feature planned for 1.9. It is a way to allow different parts of Moodle to communicate with each other, without becoming too closely coupled.

• Development:Grades

The big new user-visible feature planned for 1.9. The first use of the Events architecture.

• DimDim

Online voice-conferencing software, a bit like elluminate, which we used for the meeting, but this one is open source. Currently beta quality, but already Moodle integration exists. (We nearly used it for the meeting, but it was not quite stable enough.) It's developing rapidly, so watch this space.

• Question sharing / permissions changes (docs and long discussion starting here) and student question creation module.

Jamie described his plans.

• nwiki ?

More development has been done to make the code match Moodle coding standards. Still not sure when it would go into core. The database upgrade is big and scary, so when we do it, we must be sure the new database structure is right, and will not need significant changes for a long time afterwards. Really needs more developers to download it from contrib and try it.

• Moodle 1.9 release plans

We are aiming for a beta release at the end of May. That means all work on new features must be finished by then. Then about a month's bug fixing will hopefully be enough, and we can release mid July. All developers, please try to stick to the end of May deadline.

Other items of interest

• Google Summer of Code projects

Martin D welcomed the SoC students to Moodle development, and briefly went through the various projects that are planned.

• OU wiki

Just a simple wiki, not designed to replace the core Moodle one, but should be available as a contrib module in a couple of months, for anyone who is interested.

• OU offline Moodle

Project that OU (In particular Chris) is doing with Intel. Not clear how useful it is, but an interesting idea. Expect a forum post in the next few days.

• Selenium testing

Al (OU) is working on a way of using Selenum to test Moodle. Focussing on the quiz at first. Expect a forum post in the next week or so.

• Opaque

Tim is working on this, and has just got it working with OpenMark. A way of linking questions from other systems such as the OU's OpenMark or Chris Sangwin's STACK into Moodle.