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People frequently ask the question 'when will [an OU-developed Moodle plugin] be available for [a new or upcoming Moodle version]?' So I'm writing a blog post to cover it. Not very amusing I'm afraid...

In general, OU releases are about six months behind the community Moodle version (possibly seven months now the community schedule has been shifted). This is necessary to ensure reliability but also to give us time to update our plugins, while maintaining new feature development.

If you want to use a released, tested version of our plugins, you'll need to follow our release schedule. Or if you want to live life on the edge, you should probably find that the untested 'master' branch of our plugins will have been updated to work on the next Moodle version by about two months before our live release, i.e. about four months behind moodle.org.

This was probably hard to understand, so let me do headings and bullet points.

If you want a Moodle 2.4 version of our plugins...

• (Moodle 2.4 came out on 3 December 2012.)
• An untested version has been available in the 'master' branch of each plugin in GitHub since approximately the start of April 2013.
• The tested version will be available in the MOODLE_24_STABLE branch of each plugin in GitHub at some point early in June 2013. (You can pester me online if I have forgotten to update it!)

If you want a Moodle 2.5 version of our plugins...

• (Moodle 2.5 came out on 14 May 2013.)
• An untested version will be available in the 'master' branch of each plugin in GitHub by approximately the start of October 2013.
• The tested version will be available in the MOODLE_25_STABLE branch of each plugin in GitHub at some point early in December 2013.

Caveats

• The above dates for our future releases are not definite and are subject to change!
• You can extrapolate from this to Moodle 2.6 (June 2014 live date), Moodle 2.7 (December 2014), etc - although we might change our release pattern by then, who knows.
• As soon as we release a new stable version, we stop supporting the previous stable version. For example, once we have a MOODLE_24_STABLE branch, there will be no more changes to our MOODLE_23_STABLE branch. If anybody wants to support these old branches, we suggest forking our GitHub repositories.

Occasionally asked questions

• I want to use your plugin in a new Moodle version before these dates, does it work? No idea! Please try it. (Sometimes plugins intended for a particular Moodle version will actually work unmodified in the next version. Unfortunately there are lots of cases where this does not hold true.) If it doesn't work, you can feel free to file a GitHub issue, but we probably won't fix it sooner than those dates.

• It doesn't work but I still want to use it before these dates, what can I do? Please fix it yourself and send us the patch.

• I have a patch that fixes your plugin for the next Moodle version, do you want it? Yes we do! And thank you for fixing it. But because of how our release process works, the 'master' branch of our plugins has to refer to the release currently in development at the OU. For example, if you submit a patch now for Moodle 2.5, we won't be able to put it on the master version of the plugin until about the start of September 2013 (about a month earlier than the dates I gave above). Of course, if you've put your patch on a GitHub issue, then other users can still benefit from the patch sooner by applying it manually themselves.

 

Oh dear, it's my first blog post of the year.

There is probably something more interesting I could talk about, but we're getting a bunch of questions about 2.4 versions of OU plugins lately.

To recap the OU schedule:

• We typically go live with a Moodle release about six months after it comes out, unless something goes wrong.
• Development for our release takes a three-month period that ends about a month before our release.

In this particular case for 2.4:

• We should have stable versions of our plugins for 2.4 (MOODLE_24_STABLE) in June.
• We should have development versions (on the master branch) that work in 2.4 at some point between February (yes, I know it's February now) and the end of April.

Of course, some of our plugins from previous releases may continue to work unchanged - it depends whether any of the APIs in Moodle core were modified in a way that breaks our plugins in that release.

Where our plugins don't work in 2.4, feel free to file an issue on our GitHub site, but be aware that we won't fix it until our development period starts. If it's a simple problem and you want to fix it for us by submitting a patch, please do - we'll try to apply these patches early in the development period, i.e. more like February than April. (We can't apply them before the development period starts though, sorry.)

This is a brief blog post to let ForumNG users know that I've now, finally, set up a stable branch.

MOODLE_21_STABLE branch at GitHub

This branch will shortly (from Tuesday) match the version on our live servers and should continue to do so until we stop using Moodle 2.1 (which is currently scheduled for April 6th). After that it becomes unsupported and we'll hopefully have a MOODLE_22_STABLE branch.

You can still use the 'master' version of the code, if you want our current untested development version. As of just now, there is a change to the master version which fixes a critical Moodle 2.2 bug (email sending was broken), but unfortunately also means that the master version won't work on Moodle 2.1 any more.

So to summarise:

• We now provide a MOODLE_21_STABLE branch which is the same as our live servers so should be stable and reliable and will receive critical security fixes. It does not work on MySQL.
• As of today, the master branch requires Moodle 2.2 or above. It does work on MySQL - thanks to Brian King for providing the answer to the problem from my last post.

If you really really want a version that works on both 2.1 and MySQL, I guess you can grab the relevant commit from GitHub (i.e. the one just before the commit where I say it requires 2.2).

I haven't done a public blog post for a while, so here's one! It is mainly of interest to anyone using our add-on modules (ForumNG, OU blog, OU wiki); apologies for general boringness.

The OU is now live with our VLE2, based on Moodle 2.1.x, on a couple of courses. So it's a slowish launch but trust me, there have still been plenty of panics along the way.

On an entirely unrelated matter, if you are using the beta versions of OU modules for Moodle 2, especially ForumNG, it would be a good idea to upgrade to the latest version from our github site - after testing it on your system first of course. Just saying.

Seriously - I do have a system in place to transfer single commits from our system into our GitHub public repositories now, so you can actually see what hideous bugs got fixed. The commits do reference numbers in our own bug tracking system, which is internal so you can't see it, but you can read the summary and see the code changes. This might be enough to achieve most of the comedy value, or alternatively to make an informed decision about including the same code patch in your own servers.

It would be a good idea to get a GitHub account if you don't already have one and 'watch' the repository if you use one of our plugins (or use the Atom feeds or whatever else they provide) so that you can see each change as it comes in, just in case it might be important to you

At present, the version on our repositories is what we're still calling a beta - it is typically ahead of the live server, but as we are currently in a rather wild-west deployment phase, not by much! There will be a point where we switch to basing the repositories on our stable branches so that only critical bugfixes appear there. I'll no doubt blog about that at the time. Until then you should be extra careful about testing before you upgrade.

 

 

Edit: This post is now out of date and there are new versions available on our GitHub site - see newer posts. I have deleted the files from Google Docs to avoid confusion.

I've been ridiculously busy over the past weeks but having hit (or, at least, passed) one deadline I now have time at least to write a blog post...

As promised, except slightly late, I'm now releasing the main OU contrib modules - oublog, ouwiki, and forumng - in their Moodle 2 versions.

These are not very tested alpha versions and are bound to be broken in various ways. (I probably don't want bug reports at the moment, because basically I know lots of things are wrong.) We are not using these in live production systems and I would recommend that other people don't either.

Link to Google Docs folder containing the three zip files

If you're familiar with these modules you will note that these are basically exactly the same as the 1.9 version except with support for the Moodle 2 attachments system. (So that, if we were actually running Moodle 2 here, I could actually attach files to a blog post instead of having to stick them on a random google docs site.) OU blog and wiki (but not yet ForumNG) also support the Moodle 2 portfolio API as well. All three support activity completion.

There is one notable case of reduced functionality in the wiki - we have been phasing out the 'comments' facility because it is confusing (timid students add comments when they should be editing the page - having two communication mechanisms is confusing) and it is now not present. The 'annotations' facility that lets teachers 'mark' work and add comments to it is still there. (but, no gradebook integration yet.)

OU wiki and OU blog were converted by Catalyst developers. ForumNG was converted by us (actually, me). All are released under GPL.

The required Moodle version is 2.0.2, except for annotation in ouwiki requires 2.0.2+ or 2.0.3 to work properly. These versions are probably not correctly defined in the 'requires' variable in version.php...

Anyway, this is definitely an 'at your own risk' thing (but then it always is). If you want to use them, good luck ;)

We hope to release 'more tested' versions of these modules after the OU deploys them in live systems this autumn.

Here's a blog entry to let you (=anyone who cares) know what I've been doing so far this year. Apart from thinking 'wtf how is it another year already'.

This is another very technical post, because I don't really have anything non-technical to say this time, so apologies to anyone who isn't a programmer, it may be time to make a swift exit...

I've made several small changes to core Moodle 2. The new process for external developers to get changes included in the core system is a bit cumbersome but it really seems to be working quite well, at least when the tracker hasn't fallen over.

Also thanks to Petr (Moodle HQ developer) for helping with a proposal for letting modules do more things to the front page, which basically means third party developers can create modules that behave like label (displaying content on the front page instead of just a link) or like forum (showing dynamic, in this case unread-messages, information on the front page). It also tidies up and documents the infrastructure around this area. I've done all the work now but this hasn't been accepted into Moodle code yet; I'm typing with crossed fingers right now. (By the way, if it is accepted, I don't know whether it will be accepted into Moodle 2.0.x or 2.1.)

One last thing while talking about core stuff - I made a teensy little plugin for Moodle 2 strictly for developers that lets you one-button toggle between your normal (presumably 'debug') settings, and some faster 'production'-style settings, for when you want to realistically profile performance using Eloy's nice xhprof integration. No point profiling something that's running slowly because of extra debugging calculations, after all. If anybody wants this, please grab it from my GoogleDocs area.

Back with OU custom developments, I've done some of the work to convert ForumNG to Moodle 2, including converting all the database code to the new API. That took quite a while as the search for affected lines that needed to be changed initially found over 600 results.

As for the three other members of my team, Ray has been working on Structured Content [the system that turns XML into textbook-style content on our Moodle websites]. This is working quite well on Moodle 2 now. Alan is also converting a necessary subsystem for that, and Al is working on the 'log in as example student' administrative feature that we use instead of the core switch role feature.

This is the type of thing we're supposed to be doing. Unfortunately I have also had to fix some fairly serious bugs in ForumNG this week, and Ray's had to do some in Structured Content, both in our current 1.9 system. Obviously bugs are especially annoying because we have to fix them in both versions now. (Public notice to all staff and students: stop finding bugs in our current system! I'm trying to work on the new one!)

In addition to the actual bugs, there are also other support issues I have to investigate which aren't likely to be bugs with our system, probably just some weird configuration problem between us and other university systems - like at the moment, somebody doesn't seem to be able to get into the system when they totally should be allowed access. (Public notice to all staff and students: stop not being able to log in to our current system! I'm- wait, that doesn't really work, does it.)

Anyway, that's how things are going so far this year. Maybe I can think of something more interesting to put in the next blog entry, but I wouldn't bet on it!

There's now a 'stable version' of ForumNG. This is intended for anyone else who wants to use it on a production Moodle 1.9 site. From September, this should be exactly the same as the live, fully-tested version used with students on the OU system.

Since I made a long forum post about it, I'll just suggest you should please read that for full information if you're interested! Or for the lazy, the download link can be found on the standard information/download page for ForumNG.

Also: I apologise to anyone whose comments I didn't reply to, or replied crazy late. I do now have a feed reader set up to monitor the Atom feed of blog comments, so I should be able to respond quickly to any comments you leave on this bug in future (assuming I have anything to add, that is). That is, if it (said feed reader) works. I am not at all sure it does...

Here's an update on what we've been coding recently in the area of the OU where I work! I've done a few things, some of which may be of interest to other Moodle users, others not so much.

• I fixed final glitches etc. in the courses dashboard for tutors (mentioned before; it uses a webservice to access information from our Moodle system, and other systems, about which forums a tutor can access across all courses and whether they contain unread messages, then displays all these links in one place for convenient access).
• I wrote a block for the glossary in Moodle 2. Teachers can add this block to a glossary then use it to search all the other glossaries they can access. The idea is, if they want a glossary entry about something for a course they're writing, they can search all other courses to see if somebody already wrote one. I'd love if people try it out (and I'd love even more if you can manage to convince the Moodle HQ folk that it should be included in core Moodle).
  There will be a version of this feature in OU Moodle 1.9, but I haven't written that version yet. This development was part of our current project to learn more about coding for Moodle 2.0, which several developers here are involved in as we work out how to plan for a possible upgrade of our systems. Coding in Moodle 2 is definitely nicer than in 1.9, so I hope we can go ahead with it...
• I updated the Java audio recording applet I have, which is designed for students to record themselves. It's basically just to save them having to download a standalone application; everything it does is local. Anyway, it now looks nicer (we didn't have graphic design resource, but I tidied it up based on the upcoming new OU styles that were already designed) and a few usability glitches have been ironed out. The applet's open source; you can get the code here, or try it out on this temporary prototype site. Assuming we don't find any horrible problems with it, this will be used to replace the current Audio Recording Tool for Languages courses.
• I added support for .mp4 in more places in OU Moodle (it was already supported in some places). We're transitioning from .flv. Now we're going to be fully ready for the .mp4 video format just in time for it to become obsolete. Awesome!
• Thanks to the current round of testing from our Technical Testing team, I fixed lots and lots of bugs in OU Moodle (for our June releases) including some in our publicly-available modules (ForumNG, OU wiki) and just a couple in core Moodle 1.9 and 2.0 as well.

I've done some other things in the last couple of weeks too, but I think I'll stop there; this is supposed to just give you an idea, not to be an exhaustive list... sorry about that! However, I should also mention the others on my team:

• Ray has nearly finished auto-archiving for ForumNG. The idea is you can set forums to automatically delete discussions when they're inactive for a number of months. If you prefer, you can also make it move the discussions to another forum (presumably a hidden 'archive forum' or something). This means that very busy, very long-running forums won't eat up too much database space and won't reduce in performance as the number of discussions climbs into many thousands.
• Mahmoud has nearly finished advanced search for ForumNG. In addition to the existing free-text search (powered by the ousearch block), you can search by date or by user (full name, partial name, or username).

I hope we'll do the public 'stable version' ForumNG release in a couple of weeks (shortly after the OU's update on June 1st). The idea is that this will be maintained in line with the fully-tested OU updates, rather than getting every new (and possibly broken) feature as soon as we finish it. So it won't have the two features mentioned above, but it should be useful if you want to run ForumNG on a major site.

Finally, a side note: I just bought a tune called Theme From HTML (Steve Hill & Technikal; Dark by Design mix; on Masif). Playing it now. It's very ugly indeed. If you imagine the 4:4 kick/snare is your head and the bassline is a brick wall, it sounds just like coding HTML for Internet Explorer! Awesome.

Yes, I fail at updating blog. Sorry. However! Here's an update.

ForumNG

We fixed several critical bugs in the contrib version thanks to bug reports from the community. Thanks! There have also been bugfixes from our internal testing.

Ray's finished the subscribe-to-discussion feature (but I don't think it is committed to the contrib version yet).

OU blog

Mahmoud's working on the individual-blog feature (aka 'learning journal' - every student has their own individual private blog within a course, which their tutor can monitor).

I put in a feature request to see if we can allow public comments (moderated) so that people who don't have an Open University account can leave comments in my blog. (Wait, did I say my blog?! I mean, the vast array of blogs hosted on our system! Er, don't pass this bit on to the people who prioritise feature requests.) Even if this gets the go-ahead it will be quite some time before it is developed though.

OU wiki

Bryan's annotation feature (which basically lets tutors 'mark' work in the wiki by locking a page and adding comments at any point within the text) is finished and mostly bugfixed, and I think it's great! We've been showing it off to people as part of our upcoming release (see below). I'm afraid this also is not in our community release yet - we need to do an update of ouwiki at some point.

My work

I've been continuing to spend a depressing amount of time on support and bugfixing and troubleshooting and writing specifications and even just on reassigning tasks. I don't actually mind doing any of this, but it's put me way behind on the dashboard system I'm supposed to be developing.

That said this week I did get back into work on that system and it is great (not the system, the work). It's in Java which means everything in the IDE works perfectly (I can refactor, woohoo) and I'm writing unit tests immediately after I finish each new method, with code coverage for tests at about 80% (the 20% is mostly odd/impossible failure cases and stupid setup code and the like). This should be really reliable! I hope.

General comedy

I did a briefing about our upcoming release for Helpdesk yesterday and for Media (an internal division that... eh don't worry about it) today, both done together with Sharon who is in charge of dealing with the transition from the old proprietary conferencing system to forums (and other things) within our Moodle-based VLE.

These already had a certain comedy aura because the 'upcoming release' has just been postponed (somebody's off sick in the team that works on servers and the person who would've stepped in for them is on leave) so we're doing briefings for an update that isn't even going to happen yet. But it's even better because:

• In yesterday's briefing, somebody turned off the Forums block just before we did the demos. I was showing off the mobile view. 'So er... what there are no forums! ... well if the forums were showing, they'd be there, and it would only show the unread ones...' etc.
• In today's briefing, the computer in the presentation room has an irritating wireless mouse, and it wasn't working! For added amusement, they replaced the keyboard with one which has all the keys in the wrong place (Return and Backspace tiny and surrounded by other keys) so I kept mistyping.
  After I did some of the demo on keyboard only, Sharon saved the day by going to get the key to the locked cupboard with the computer in, and plugging her own mouse to it. Best moment: when she'd just achieved this, still in my part of the demo, and we were on opposite sides of the room, me with the keyboard and her with the mouse. 'Click on the Resources link!' Good times.

Yes, I have pretty low standards for what consitutes 'comedy' but, well, I work in computing.

(And talking of low standards, I also made an an image macro based on the Xzibit 'Yo dawg' meme with reference to a proposed new Open University website design... but I think that one had better stay in-house.)

Here's my weekly update. It's just one week into 2010 (workwise) and I'm already feeling a bit tired...

I took the first week of the year off. This week I've been trying to deal with bugs (a few in live system, mainly in the March release that we finished developing before Christmas). One of these was a special bonus IE7 bug in one of our systems. IE7 crashed when you tried to print a page. It turns out that the crash occurred when headings had a margin of 2em. Setting it to 1em or 1.5em solved the problem. WHAT. That browser is crazy.

Apart from that I've been helping developers on my team get started with work for the June release. 'Helping them get started' is a euphemism for 'telling them to do something'. Unfortunately, it usually involves me having to write specifications and answer lots of questions and things like that, which makes it a lot less fun than the average dictator gig.

The goal of doing some actual development has seemed rather far away - I did clear all the assigned bugs now, but there will be more, it's like washing-up or something. Anyhow when I get started on that  I will be working on a new courses dashboard, initially for tutors.

This is going to show you all the forums on all the courses you're tutoring on - links and the 'unread' indicator so you know if you need to check that forum. The idea is that it saves tutors visiting every single course website when they just need to know if the forum changed. (It's not just forums, which by the way it will support both old and new NG ones - we will also show OU blogs and wikis, although they don't have unread information so we will just use the last-changed date.)

Probably the most interesting thing from my point of view is that this development isn't being done inside Moodle! I get to write it in Java. It will support some links from other university systems, and maybe eventually include other external systems too - that's why it's not being built as a part of the Moodle system here. (And by the way, you might notice it's actually a little bit like the existing My Moodle feature. But not the same.)

Back to Moodle development, we are doing some more stuff to our contributed modules in this development period. There will be more improvements to ForumNG (and another public release - in fact we're moving development to occur primarily in the contrib cvs, hopefully very soon). And we're finally adding the 'learning journal' feature to OU blog (so that you can have a course blog where students don't see other students' entries).

Finally, I'd like to highlight this article about developing an Android app just because Anthony wrote it. Might be helpful if anyone finds themself needing to do the same...

Now, I think I'll head home... um... just remembered, I do actually need to do some real life washing-up as well...

Over the last few weeks I've mainly been having to concentrate on fixing bugs in our upcoming release and indeed our current live system (argh, quiz), but I managed to squeeze in work on a couple of new forum features. I've made another very short screencast to demonstrate them.

Watch the screencast nowVideo player: forumng-unreadflag.swf

(6MB, ~3 mins)

Some notes:

• This screencast uses the standard Moodle theme, which is a lot less pretty than the Open University one! (Thanks to our excellent graphic designers.) I thought it would be nice to show how it looks on standard Moodle one time.
• These two features were added based (respectively) on student and tutor responses to our existing pilots, and on earlier feature requests from tutors.
• This is in our March release but if you're a student or tutor at the OU and you're wondering when you get to use this forum, the answer is probably not 'March'! Sorry.
• If on the other hand you work at another institution that uses Moodle - we haven't yet updated the community release of ForumNG to include these features, so don't download it tomorrow and get disappointed. We'll be updating the community release around end of year, hopefully after that it will keep pace directly with our development.

Hope this was at least a little bit interesting! As usual, there will be more screencasts whenever we have more features to show. Given all the bugfixing that's going on recently, I'm not quite sure when that will be...

Thought I'd add a post about this now instead of waiting for my regular Friday blog post.

ForumNG is now available as an optional add-on for standard Moodle 1.9.

If you run a Moodle 1.9.x installation, please feel free to try it out. However, do bear in mind that this is a pilot version and is sort of halfway between testing (i.e. earlier versions have been tested but we changed a bunch of things since). Please install on a test server first, and do not use for any real work unless you've verified for yourself that it is good enough for your purposes.

If you do find bugs please report them via the Moodle bug tracker. There's a link to that in the modules & plug-ins entry above.

This week we've started work on development for our March release. They haven't even started testing the December release yet, but these things have to overlap or we'd never get anything done...

There's a lot of development on ForumNG scheduled because the March release is a big push here - we want lots of courses to start moving onto the new forum, for new course presentations that start from that point on. I'm spending the vast majority of my time on it, and Ray Guo is also doing some of the new features. Hopefully I'll get Ray to make a screencast of his stuff so it's not just me all the time.

By the way, the version for Moodle 1.9 contrib (optional install) should be getting made really soon. (Famous last words.)

Anyhow, some people like the screencasts, so I decided to make another one each time I have a new vaguely interesting feature to show. This week I had to spend a lot of time scheduling tasks and suchlike (and getting Tim to do things he doesn't really want to do because he wants to work on quiz... but he's already implemented a really cool admin report). But I did manage to implement a new feature as well.

The feature is 'forward by email'. You can send a whole discussion, or selected posts from a discussion, in an email to any email address.

Here's the screencastVideo player: forumng-forward.swf

(about 6MB). As usual, the link requires Firefox or another browser that is happy to play .swf files when clicked.

By the way, I didn't mention it in the screencast, but the whole thing does work for non-JavaScript users (including our 'friends' using IE6; we turned off ForumNG's JavaScript in IE6 because trying to make it work was a nightmare). The interface is basically the same but with less of the fancy visuals and more of the 'click a button, wait for a new page to load'.