OU blog

This contributed code module is an alternative blog system for Moodle. It can be used in place of, or in addition to, the standard Moodle blog system.

Features

• Provides user blogs (similar to Moodle ones; everyone has their own blog) and course blogs (add an instance of the module to a course, and students in the course can all contribute to a shared blog).
• Full support for comments. Comments can be turned off for a particular blog or post, but otherwise people can leave comments in both user and course blogs. In order to avoid spam, you currently have to be a logged-in user in order to leave comments, even if the post itself is open to the public.
• Access control levels: private (user only), course members, logged-in users, or worldwide.
• Group support for course blogs (so you can have per-group blogs).
• Blog-specific tags. Tags are not connected to the Moodle tag system but apply only within the blog. You click on a tag to see all posts in the current blog with that tag.
• User cosmetic options - change the name of your blog (from My Name's Blog to whatever you like) and add a description.
• Standard Moodle 1.9 role/permission support (eg if you want to make it so students can't post to course blogs, etc).
• Post and comment management. You can edit or delete posts and delete comments, but deleted or previous text remains available to administrator users. (This is necessary in various circumstances.)
• RSS and Atom feeds.
• Automatically integrates with the OU search system (if that is installed) to provide fulltext search of blog posts.

There is no connection between this system and standard Moodle blog; installing this system doesn't do anything to your existing Moodle blogs. If you want to move over to this system entirely, you would use the Moodle admin option that lets you disable its internal blog feature, to avoid confusion. (There is no way at present to transfer actual content from Moodle blog to oublog.)

Requirements

• Requires PHP 5.
• Tested with Postgres 8.1 and MySQL 5. (Should work on other Moodle-supported databases.)
• Tested on current Moodle 1.9.2+ from CVS. (Probably works on any Moodle 1.9 though.)

No complex installation is necessary, just drop the oublog folder into your Moodle mod folder and visit the admin notifications page to install.

OU blog was specified by the Open University which funded the work. The actual development was done by Matt Clarkson of Catalyst, and further bugfixes and minor changes were then added by me (sam marshall) at the OU.

Development status

This blog is in active use at the Open University. We continue to maintain and develop it and plan to do public releases aligned with our internal release cycle.

There are no major developments planned at present.

See Forum post with update as of 19th August 2010 for very recent and good news.

Currently version R1.4, don't use the usual download link, use the one in the body of the plugin information page.

See also

• OU blog is a Modules and plugins database page for downloads and more information.
• Using Moodle OU blog - optional blog module forum discussion