Projects for new developers

Here is a list of current and upcoming "student" projects within the Moodle project. Each project here is a nice self-contained project suitable for student programmers to complete in three months or less, and must have an associate mentor who is a regular Moodle developer.

We'll be using this list to register projects as part of Moodle's participation in the Google Summer of Code 2007.

Moodle Developers, please add your project ideas to this page using the existing format. Make sure you include your own name as a mentor.

Projects needing programmers

Integration with bibliographic systems such as Wikindx

Background

Managing references and citing them is an important behaviour in university education and research. Bibliographic facilities are quite complicated and go beyond the capabilities of Moodle built-in technology (e.g. the database activity). Integrating Moodle with open-source bibliographic software such as Wikindx could much facilitate this practice within Moodle.

Overview

Design and construct an integration with Wikindx (or other open-source bibliographic tools, if appropriate).

Details

Teachers should be able to easily refer to wikindx bibliography items throughout a Moodle course, and be able to:

• Generate correctly-formatted in-place references (using standard styles e.g. Harvard, APA) for the commonly-cited reference types (e.g. journal article, book chapter, book). It may be possible to delegate the formatting directly to wikindx (since it already performs functions like these) rather than implementing a whole new set of logic in the Moodle integration.
  • Possibly, allow some kind of direct searching of a wikindx database from within Moodle, so as to make it easier to refer to items
• Generate reading lists / bibliographies
• Allow export of the above into common machine-readable formats such as Bibtex or RIS. (Wikindx can perform this so again it's a question of hooking into, or expanding, wikindx functionality.)

See also Development:Wikindx and this forum discussion too

Projects under development

Global search

Background

Currently Moodle has forum searching, glossary searching and database searching, all independent. There is no way to search for everything else in a course, though, such as resources, wiki pages, activity info (eg assignments) and especially not to do it all in one search.

Overview

Design and construct a modular solution for global search in Moodle.

Details

1. it should be fast and accurate
2. it should allow modules to expose their data structures to the core search via the usual API (function in lib.php) allowing any module to include itself in the search
3. it should allow the kinds of search parameters that the forum search does now (or better!)
4. people should not be able to search things they couldn't normally see
5. it should utilise the new tags system as much as possible
6. (extra points) it should be able to rank results by relevance and combine results in different modules

Mentor: Martin Dougiamas

Programmer: Michael Champanis

Global search project notes

Projects Completed

1. Presets for Database module project notes
2. Integrated bug tracker project notes
3. AJAX course format project notes
4. Admin page cleanup project notes
5. Calendar export to iCal