Developer meeting November 2008

Developer meetings > November 2008 meeting

The meeting was at 23:00 UTC on Monday, 24 November 2008. We had 36 participants and we covered everything in around two and a quarter hours.

• Recording of the meeting (password moodle)

Meeting notes finished soon!

Moodle 2.0

• Overview

Martin D said that progress continuing with Moodle 2.0, plus lots of 1.9 fixes. Moodle 1.9.4 will probably be released soon. Moodle 2.0 development includes roles interface improvements, repository stuff, portfolio API, web services, databases and a privacy project.

• New roles interfaces demo

Tim demonstrated manage roles every role has new setting defining where you can assign the role, e.g. student to course and activity only, basic mode, allow checkboxes, advanced mode - old page, search / filter list, e.g. filter report, stole Sam's cool rotated column heading from activity completion, for allow role assignments, assign system roles - only admin and course creator, can't unassign the role of admin, options for enrolling users tidier, using javascript, groups page uses same widget, ajaxy search, search options from start of usernames or anywhere in user's name, search options off by default, search options area colapsed, when you create a new course it dumps you on the assign roles page, feedback from person doing usability testing, people want to know where to go next, now there's a link near the bottom, override permissions not changed much, prohibit column hidden, check permissions screen, user selection widget, shows which caps they have, explanation link with popup, drilling down, showing all role assignments user has, user's role report, roles tab in user profile, this user's role assignments, icons by each role assignment link to assign roles page, none of default roles can be assigned in the user context but if they can assign roles relative to this user link

Martin: things can be further polished if anyone has any suggestions, Tim: as more people look, they will have more suggestions for polishing it further really good discussion in the roles forum, have we got the best names? Martin: need to do usability testing on real users, Tim: ask real teachers

• Enrolment plugins proposal - Tim
• Database related changes: DML, DDL, DTL and new native database drivers - skodak
• Privacy project MDL-17205 - skodak
• New web services system and Development:Moodle API- Jerome
• Repository Plugins & new chat module - Dongsheng
• Feedback link for all elements If there's time, and I get up again before midnight - Jeff Forssell
• Tagging system state? - Pablo Etcheverry

Other news

• Google Highly Open Participation Contest (GHOP)

Helen talked about GHOP, a contest funded by Google which gives students aged 13-18 the chance to learn more about and contribute to different aspects of open source software development. Last year, our participation in GHOP was very successful, with approx. 100 tasks being completed by around 50 students. There was a wide variety of tasks including video tutorials explaining 1.9 features, new language pack (Latin), selenium scripts, XMLDB developer documentation, database presets - see GHOP/2008 for the full list. Last year the contest opened on 27 November 2007. We're still waiting for an announcement this year. We'll have a task ideas page in the wiki for everyone to suggest tasks they'd like to see completed.

• Encouraging new developers

Helen gave a brief update on the initiatives for encouraging new developers which were mentioned in the September developer meeting. We now have a tracker field for identifying easy-to-fix bugs, dev.moodle.org is set up, just waiting for content ;-) and we also have Planet Moodle for aggregating Moodle developer blogs. Please contact Helen or Martin if you'd like your blog feed to be added.

• Events Subscriptions / Notifications sub-system

Mike C talked about the concept of events subscriptions and asked for comments. Martin D replied that Mike should take a look at Development:Messaging_2.0, GSOC project which just needs a little tidying up.

• Forum rewrite for 2.x

Sam described the forum rewrite being considered by the OU to improve usability and performance. Initially it would be developed as a contrib module for 1.9. Hopefully it would be added to core in a later version, perhaps 2.1.

• GSOC Mentor Summit

Dan P talked about his visit to Google HQ for the GSOC Mentor Summit together with Anthony and David Horat. People were very eager to talk to Dan in his Moodle T-shirt, and he had good conversations with people from Sakai and the DSpace foundation. Dan described the summit as a great thing to be a part of.

• AOB

Martin mentioned Development:Coding_draft that he was writing, and asked for volunteers to maintain the workshop and lesson modules.