Category: Hack/Doc Fest at Lafayette

Hack/Doc Fest V: Day 1 Report

Here’s what the Hack/Doc crew at Lafayette College worked on during Day 1 of the event:

Courtney Bentley, Lafayette College: Went through the Documentation tracker in Redmine and updated all the queues. She posted “Moodle Roles Explained” to CLAMP-IT and is working on a supplementary document on on creating a “unlimited quiz time” role for students.

Sarah Ryder, Hampshire College: Quickmail: Found the can receive bug (needs to be committed). Looked into option for sending emails to everyone at once, but would require creating a whole new function. Decided that was a little silly.

Caroline Moore, Smith College: Did a lot of chatting with Dan Wheeler at Colgate about Simple File Upload. Looks like he took her edits and made them work. Caroline is in the process of testing that out. Would like to add a “Force Download” checkbox with Simple File Upload.

Charles Fulton, Kalamazoo College:
Topic Import/Restore thing; applied fix from Tracker.  WIll add vote for it to Tracker. Spent time beating up on Chat.

Eric Merrill, Oakland University:
Closed out a number of tasks related to theLuminis Message Broker plugin. Show version of LMB module, secure LMB importing; before you needed to have a secure htaccess file; now the module handles the security. Led a conversation about LMB integration, common problems encountered, what documentation is available, etc.

Steve Taylor, Vassar College and Sarah Ashley, Drew University:
Worked on migration notes for moving from Blackboard to Moodle. We’re considering having a “Blackboard to Moodle” brownbag in the spring semester.

Mark O’Neil, Vassar College & Rosalyn Metz, Wheaton College: They spent time looking at a “daily” format for Moodle courses, but found that wasn’t really an option unless they hacked core code in Moodle. But they did find some alternatives they want to try out.

Jeanne Farrell, Diane DeMelo, Wheaton College: Documented differences between the Liberal Arts Edition and vanilla Moodle, creating a plain text explaination. They also looked at Bob Puffer, Luther College’s fixes for the Gradebook.

Rosalyn Metz, Wheaton College: Took on feature to backup a single section from a course.

Jason Meinzer, Reed College: Closing out code tasks in Redmine, looking at subgroups in metacourses.

Daniel Landau, Reed College: Version control wrangling and working on removing the zlib requirement for Assignment ZIP.

Virtual Participants

On the virtual front, our nine hack/dockers worked on:

  • Roadtesting Moodle 1.9.7
  • Coming up with an evaluation list for Moodle 2.0-Dev
  • Worked on Simple File Upload

Requesting Hacks, Fixes and Documentation for Hack/Doc Fest V

Hack/Doc Fest V is coming, we’re looking for  suggestions for bug fixes, documentation and new features for Moodle  that the community would like us to address. You can add your requests by making a comment on this blog post. You don’t have to be attending Hack/Doc Fest to make suggestions — we’d like suggestions from the entire community.

Update 1/4/2010:

  • Moodle Hack/Doc Fest V Task List: A complete list of bugs, feature requests, and road tests has been been posted to Google Docs. Attendees have edit access; everyone else has view access.


    Moodle Hack/Doc Fest V, Jan. 5-7, 2010

    Moodle Hack/Doc Fest V will be held January 5-7, 2010 at Lafayette College in Easton, Pa. The event will feature programmers and instructional technologists coming together to improve Moodle. We expect to continue work on CLAMP’s Moodle: Liberal Arts Edition project, fix outstanding Moodle bugs, and craft new training materials. We also hope to test drive Moodle 2.0, which is scheduled for a beta release at the end of 2009.

    With this Hack/Doc, CLAMP returns to its “pay your own way” funding model. Lafayette will be providing breakfast, lunch and snacks for attendees, but they will need to pay for their own transportation, lodging, and dinner. In addition to the conventional Hack/Doc Fest, we’re planning on coordinating a virtual component to Hack/Doc Fest that will allow people to participate from their own campuses.

    Visit the event home page for more information and to register.