Category Archives: moodle

Moodle Administrator Settings

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I’m really privileged to be a mentor for Google Summer of Code with Moodle again this year! If you’ve not heard of google summer of code before the basic premise is that google fund university students to work on open source software over the duration of their summer break. The idea is to get more contributors into open source software and moodle is a proud participant to this great scheme. The great slogan is ‘flip bytes not burgers!’

Penny and I are really excited to be mentoring Christopher Waclawik in his project to make XML administrative settings for moodle. We’re just coming to the end of the community bonding period, developing the specification for the project and moving towards the start of coding, but of course we still need absolute community involvement!

Moodlers, imagine the prospect of installing moodle, choosing your local language and default settings which fit best with how you would like your moodle to be setup. This is one of the great aims of the project!

The advantages of these defaults have perhaps best shown themselves to me in the lively discussions which took place recently about grades over 100%. This concept of grades over 100% doesn’t seem to have spread much further than the in the USA, many outside the USA can’t understand the concept and indeed the original release Moodle 1.9 didn’t support this concept at all. Functionality has now been implemented in moodle to allow this – but it is not default. This choice makes sense to many but those who feel like this functionality is essential – like many localised settings in moodle its impossible to get the perfect defaults for all scenarios – this is really where I see these defaults fitting in.

In my own day job we are frequently overriding moodle defaults to fit more with our localised environment (UK schools) so I realy can envisage the advantages of these for institutions rolling out moodle. But what perhaps I think is the most exciting element of this project is that it doesn’t have to be exclusive, we could all create ‘dans awesome moodle settings’ moodle settings, share them amongst oursleves and satisfy our local preferences or legsilsative obligations. This power of templates might help to combat the misconception that moodle doesn’t fit ‘x senario’.

Please contribute your thoughts to Chris’ project specificaton, point out areas we’ve forgoten and other improvements we’ve missed! This is the great thing about open source, we’re hoping for you all to become involved and become invaluable resource to us all!

See the progress in MDL-18548, Development:XML_Administrator_Settings and in the forums.

Abusing the Moodle Repository API with Guardian Open Platform

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I read about the launch of the Guardian Open Platform and immediately thought it was cool, later considering how awesome it might be for teachers trying to find resources to support their teaching – I wanted to play. The prospect of a teacher having access to search and embed all the content which was made available from the guardian sounded great & seemed like a job for a Moodle 2.0 respository plugin – so I applied for an API key.

Last week my request for an API key was finally accepted and I spent an hour or so playing with the API last night. My first thought when reading about Guardian open platform was the prospect of using it to find and embed images. Unfortunately the platform doesn’t explicitly support images at this time, and videos are supported only as a link to the source page. This means that it didn’t explicitly fit with the way other repo plugins work. The guardian platform does support the full body of text articles being retrieved and so I created a very hacky plugin which would return the body of an article in the same way youtube video links are embeded with the youtube plugin. This was mostly pointless other than for my own satisfaction as there is nothing to receive this in the editor properly without copy and paste. It seems like its probably an abuse of the repository API to not retrieve files, but it was fun to play with it.

I’m not sure if the repository API is the appropriate place for embedding this content and there are significant barriers with the guardian license terms for this to be a useable plugin. The license terms for the platform wouldn’t necessarily suit teaching at this time (content shouldn’t be stored for more than 24 hours – though it would be fine to re-request it), but of course this shouldn’t be a blocker to see if the technology would work. A lot of educational institutes have access to newspaper content via means such as lexis nexis and i’m sure a potential licensing solution for education could be developed, so its fun to play with.

On a technical level I used the openplatform-php library which guardian provide and I didn’t really like. I didn’t like it as it generated php warnings a plenty, and I wasn’t feeling particularly motivated to rewrite all these bits, so I hacked each one I came across away in a really crappy way. The really short source code (respository.php is the only actual moodle source) can be found in my git repo. Though its not that useful (as I say, just hacking in an hour) and amongst other things doesn’t deal with problems of requesting content daily according to the license terms. Even so, fun to play with open apis and integrate.

Simon Willison gave a great introduction to the whole platform, including the data store – which is equally cool.

Google Docs Repository Plugin

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When I last updated on the status of the Google Docs Repository/Portfolio plugins for Moodle 2.0, I mentioned that it wasn’t possible to download documents from Google and this meant it wasn’t really possible to make a repository plugin.

A few weeks ago Google updated their API to allow for applications to download documents, so today I found some time to update and commit the plugin into Moodle 2.0 :) .

At the moment it’s not possible for users to choose which format to export their document as, but the Google API allows exports in in a variety of formats. I’m hoping to work with Dongsheng to work out how we can let users choose which format they wish to export their document in on a per-file or per-user basis. The plugin also needs folder support adding.

As always, please test and file bugs in the tracker. :)

googledocs moodle repository plugin

Working for Free?

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I came across this interesting paper on the motivations of developers contributing to Open Source projects a few weeks ago – I’ve finally got round to reading it & it does to seem to cover all the main motivational areas I could think of and have experienced. Though i was quite surprised that there was such a high percentage of developers paid to work on OSS seven years ago!

One element that I don’t think was stressed enough in the paper was how the stimulating environment of an open source community itself is a motivating factor. I find that people who contribute to open source software tend to be highly motivated and passionate about what they do (not surprising really, since they are contributing..). This makes for a great environment to challenge and learn from each other, which is really hard to match in any other situation.

Moodle in Debian

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Over the past few weeks, i’ve been working with Francois, Penny and Matt to take over maintaining the moodle package for Debian. Unfortunately the previous maintainer could not keep up with maintenance since some time ago, and the package was orphaned (awaiting someone else to take over caring for the package). Penny invited me to get involved & we’ve been hard at work since: Producing a huge security update to debian stable, getting moodle accepted into lenny – the next version of debian (by fixing outstanding bugs which blocked it from being accepted) and getting on top of the debian bugs which were outstanding.

Unfortunately debian was in freeze stage for lenny when we took on maintaining moodle, so we could not upgrade the version from 1.8.2 (however this is much better than 1.6 which is currently in debian stable). Its great to keep moodle in debian with security support and a lot of thanks is owed to Francois Marrier (the debian developer who has taken this on) to make this happen. I’m hopeful i’ll be able to buy francois a drink in thanks sometime soon. :-)

Personally, I use Debian in my leisure & working life extensively (indeed, its the platform we use to provide moodle for 1000 schools), its a project close to my heart (and saves me so much time) so i’m really pleased to be able to contribute back to debian (as well as moodle). I have been interested in getting involved with debian for quite some time – doing this as part of the moodle packaging team is a great way to begin to get involved.

I’m confident that the moodle community will benefit from increased exposure of debian bug reports and the closer exposure of perspectives of upstream distribution packagers will also help the moodle development community. :-)

Moodle & Mojitos

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I was just reporting MDLSITE-594 and I noticed Mojtos in Martins profile interests. Mojitos have become somewhat of a moot tradition which i’ve also come to appreciate! In the current economic climate – its probably the most stable moodle development currency! :-P

So who is responsible for introducing the moodle’s premier cocktail & is there more to it than the first two shared letters? <

Moodle 2.0 and Googley Plugins

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Early screenshot of Picasa Web Albums with Picasa Plugin One of the many major features in the Moodle 2.0 Roadmap is an overhaul to handling of the files in Moodle. The Portfolio (push from moodle) & Repository (pull to moodle) API’s allow for external systems to interact with Moodle and bring exciting new possibilities!

A few months back when Penny and the gang in Australia were working toward getting a stabilised API, I decided to test them out and try to develop plugins for Google Docs during a free weekend. I was really pleased about how easy the plugins were to develop and found the process very productive – I used the api in a slightly different way to existing plugins which allowed for additional testing and we collaboratively improved things.

The Google API’s are pretty simple to get to grips with – whilst there is a mammoth zend php library which will interact with google already, I wrote my own since I didn’t think we really wanted that much bloat in Moodle. All in all it was quite a fun experience, and I got mostly working portfolio and repository plugins with very little work.

Unfortunately with the repository plugin, ‘mostly working’ was as far as I could get.. I could browse my Google Docs from Moodle, narrow down documents by text searches of the document contents and even delete the documents if I wanted – but not download the document into Moodle. Which made the plugin largely useless.. There are a few open bugs for this and it seems google are working on a solution, but for the time being its a little bit frustrating. There is a workaround using a different method of authentication but i’ve not yet got that to work either.

At the time I didn’t commit my plugins to moodle and left them in my own git repository as I wasn’t happy with this situation, I also wanted to investigate if OAuth was worth using and rapidly became busy with other things.

This weekend I finally got some time to work on this again and get some of the work into moodle core.

For authentication, i’ve created the plugins using Google’s AuthSub (whilst keeping it pluggable), which still seems to be the best way of authenticating users for Moodle because:

    • It doesn’t require any administrator setup (registering, adding API keys/certificates etc)

 

  • It doesn’t make the user enter their google username and password anywhere other than google (I feel very strongly that this is security practice we should be encouraging)

OAuth looks pretty good and useful for authenticating with multiple services, but it’d require a considerable amount of administrator setup which I was keen to avoid in favour of the plugins being used ;-)

After a bit of tidying up and updating to match the recent moodle developments I’ve now commited the Google Docs Portfolio plugin. It allows images and documents to be exported to Google Documents in a basic manner. I’ve not found a solution to the google docs repository saving problem, but i’ve created a prototype which will just insert links to google documents (rather than embedding the content).

As the Google API’s are pretty consistent, most of the work I did creating a library for Google Docs could be used to create plugins for Picasa Web Albums in very little time, so i’ve also created plugins for Picasa too and these allow both import and export from Moodle to Picasa. It should be reasonably simple to make other googley plugins by expanding lib/googleapi.php.

I’ve made a hacky little screencast to show off these features at this early stage: