The first day of Moodle Hack/Doc saw the doc’ers tackling the Herculean task of evaluating Moodle 1.9.9 by running it through our testing script. Meanwhile the developers concentrated on setting up test instances of Moodle, cleaning up outstanding issues in Redmine, and beginning code revisions.
Developers
The developers created a methodology to document CLAMP code changes and have begun integrating them into our code. We reviewed all of the “resolved” tickets in Redmine, and closed them (causing the total ticket count to drop).
The Census module now allows for start and end dates for its reports and the latest iteration to Anonymous Forums is ready for testing. We’re also evaluating hacks to improve the “My Moodle” feature in Moodle.
Luther College’s Grader report was reviewed. We decided to offer the report as part of 1.9.9.+LAE.x, but we’ll be splitting out the logic that changes the way grades are calculated. The new report allows you to scroll left and right within the grader report, offers better color coding, and increases the usability of the default gradebook view. We are currently debugging display problems in Internet Explorer.
We also folded TinyMCE 3 into Moodle 1.9.9. and have begun testing it. We also resolved issues we were having with SSHing to our development server at Reed College.
We also created a survey asking institutions about what eReserves system they use and what, if any, integration they have done between that system and Moodle.
Doc’ers
The Doc’ers spend their time running through the Moodle evaluation script to determine if there were any problems with Moodle 1.9.9. Here is their preliminary report:
Bugs
- Adding a forward slash in the wiki title causes a page to be created with the name of whatever is after the forward slash (e.g., “Tastes great/less filling” would have a page titled, “less filling” on the wiki main page.
- Wikis in Teacher mode set to separate groups will get an error if “Choose” is selected instead of one of the groups
- Wikis set to use groups throws students not in groups back to the Moodle top site
- Ratings in glossary: if “Use ratings” is checked with no grades assigned then a blank Rate drop box will appear. When the Glossary is updated the “Use rating” box is unchecked. This behavior should at least happen as a safe guard upon saving.
- Secure quiz mode: quiz opens in another window, but it isn’t secure and you can still access other windows – in Safari 4.0.5, Mac OS 10. IE on PC does same thing, and you can allow pasting from a clipboad into the answer fields
- DOC-ERS TO CONFIRM: cannot include attachments to a latest news item or calendar item
- Q & A forum posts are still available for editing up to 30 mins, which goes against the idea of disallowing students access to others’ responses until after submitting their own.
- Rating of database entries doesn’t look to be working
Feature Requests
- Quiz: teachers cannot add images as answers because they don’t get the editor
- RSS block titled Remote News Feed would make more sense as RSS News Feed
- Advanced upload of files: must complete comment field to upload response document; faculty may have embedded comments in the document instead.
