Developer meeting November 2012

Developer meetings > November 2012 meeting notes

Time	01:00 UTC on Tuesday, 20 November 2012
Meeting room	Moodle Dev Meeting Course

In this meeting we focused on the impending release of 2.4.

Attendees

Dan Marsden, Eloy Lafuente, Justin Filip, Mary Evans, Petr Škoda, Rex Lorenzo, Sam Hemelryk, Tim Hunt, Ahmad Aizuddin Aizat Bin Tajul Arif, Jonathan Doane, David Mudrak, Gavin Henrick, Helen Foster, Mark Nelson, Paul Vaughan, Rossiani Wijaya, Simon Coggins, Tim Hunt, Anne Krigger, Matt Oquist, Paul Nicholls, Michael de Raadt, Marina Glancy, Martin Dougiamas, Dan Poltawski, Barbara Ramiro, David Monllaó, Andrew Davis, Damyon Wiese, Ankit Agarwal, Rajesh Taneja, Jérôme Mouneyrac, Jason Fowlser, Adrian Greeve, Aparup Banerjee.

Moodle 2.4 release

• Minimum requirements were discussed. IE8 was raised and we are likely to drop support for IE8 in 2.5.
• We could possibly increase the PHP version to 5.3.8

Performance improvements

• MUC work completed by Sam Hemelryk
  • New API for caching.
  • Consistent shared caching system to provide consistency and add performance.
  • Now ready for use.
  • Many areas to be worked on after 2.4.
• Daily statistics process has been improved - thanks to Partners involved
• Looking to measure improvement and show graphs
• Client-side JavaScript improvements have been made, mostly successful so far

Plugin updating within Moodle

• Automatic deployment started in 2.3 with available updates. It was just reading for available updates.
• In 2.4 it will inform admins and allow them to get and install latest version.
• UML chart shows functionality
• Can be disabled through the config.php and UI
• Working towards installing new plugins from within Moodle

Course format plugins

• Big refactor done by Marina to make course formats a real plugin API
• Not much change in core Moodle functionality
• Course formats can now insert header and footer
• Course formats can be enabled/disabled and have their own settings
• You can now achieve redirection before output
• Sections can have subsections (sections inside sections), if a format defines this
• No new course formats in core yet. Hopefully the community will create some good ones.
• Works when you switch formats or when restoring a course when the previous format is no longer available.
• Note: Custom themes must be updated for 2.4 because of this change

Themes

• Icons have been updated
  • Support for SVG has been added to previous functionality
  • If you have older PNG or GIF images they will still work
  • Best output at 24x24 SVG
  • Still need raster icons for some browsers that don't support SVG
  • Block icons have been normalised at 16x16 in monochrome
  • Setting icons have been normalised at 12x12 in monochrome
  • There are new guidelines for creating new icons including standard colours to match standard icons
• We are now using the HTML5 doctype
• IE8 is now forced to use standards mode
• Simple YUI is now available for use
  • Similar to JQuery for simple actions

TinyMCE improvements

• An editor sub-plugins API has been added
• You can alter toolbar and settings for plugins

Enrolments

• Reworked restore support for enrolments
• User enrolments revert to other enrolment method when an enrolment method is uninstalled

Integration of Calendars

• Can now subscribe to iCal feeds
• This was a most wanted improvement
• Some bugs being sorted out before release

Unicode filenames in zips

• Filenames with unicode characters are now possible

Assignment enhancements

• Individual extensions
• Group assignments
  • Choose group mode and you can limit to a grouping
  • One or all students can be asked to submit
  • Markers can grade all students in a group at once
• Blind marking
  • Shows student as an anonymous user during marking
• Off-line marking
  • You can get a CVS, enter grades then upload
  • You can download a zip with submissions, mark and add feedback files, then zip and upload the feedback

Other improvements

• Blocks need to have new capabilities added.

QA Testing

• QA is about half-way through.
• Hopefully much of the QA tests will be able to be automated in future

Mobile app

• • Will handle notifications in iPhone apps
  • Will hopefully be available around Christmas
  • Will use Apache 2 license so people can release their own versions without sharing code

Hacktoberfest

• Some specs have already been started
• Will set direction for 2.5
  • Logging/Reporting/Outcomes
  • File-cloud storage

Hack-a-thon

• Ideas needed for
  • incentives (t-shirts, money, recognition on moodle.org)
  • areas of work that people could be involved in
  • how to keep people involved after the Hack-a-thon

If you would like to correct these notes, please edit this page this page or email Michael d.

Meeting chat log

Paul Vaughan

14:54

Good afternoon. :)