Developer conference May 2006

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

Moodle 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 Development:XMLDB Documentation
• Comments from Tim Hunt: datalib is big, getting even bigger, should we split? Should make sure unit tests are run on 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 (UK Open Source VLE) handles roles - see flash movie demonstrating roles interface
• post conference comment from MD, proposed by skodak: a flag to mark capabilities as "potentially insecure" would be a good idea

Additional 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 (David Puente and team)
• Re. web services, see Web Services in forthcoming Moodle forum discussion
• Comment from Mike Churchward: Contracted to do web services (gradebook, enrolments etc.), standardised IMS enterprise, working demo, want work to be right for everyone - see Web Services API
• RE. Google Summer of Code, 60 applications! Next year we must be organised, more opened up, more mentors, with projects in all areas of Moodle; potential for 30 or 40 projects; the Summer of Code gets bigger and better every year - it should be part of the Moodle calendar; anyone wanting to mentor existing projects, please contact Martin - see Student projects
• Comment from Tim Hunt: If 1.7 is to be released in September, how do we stop people starting big changes in August? Mozilla is a good model for releases, how about a public list of key bugs to fix before release?
• Reply from Martin Dougiamas: Accessibility and Sourceforge cvs caused 1.6 delay, need everyone's help with releases, use bug tracker advanced search
• Comment from Tim Hunt: OU Open Content Initiative using Moodle to present stuff, October deadline then a series of releases