Personal Blogs

Given the amount of time I had to spend fixing bugs and attending meetings and doing support this week, it's not surprising I didn't get that much done on the new OU forum. Still, here's another 'oh look! It's just like the old version!' screen:

As you can see, it does indeed look just like the old version - though OU users may notice we've put back user pictures, which are already in this screen on standard Moodle.

On this screen, the 'mark unread' buttons are currently non-functional, as are the links to view discussions (I haven't done that screen yet) and the 'Add a new discussion topic' button (ditto). But paging works. Woohoo! Woohoo indeed.

New features that will be on this screen, most of which also don't work yet:

• Sorting - the default sort is by 'Last post' date (newest first). You'll also be able to click on the other column headings to sort by 'Discussion' (alphabetical), 'Started by' (alphabetical), and possibly by 'Replies' (biggest first) - not sure about this one. This will be a proper database sort, so you can use it even if there are multiple pages. Note: This feature is already in the OU's customisation of old forum.
• Sticky discussions - this is sort of half-done. These will display at the top of the list regardless of sort (if there are multiple sticky posts, they will show in the selected order). These may look different in some way (eg pin icon) and there will be a dividing line between sticky posts and normal ones.
• Locked discussions - again half-done. There will be an icon (eg lock icon) indicating when posts are closed for further discussion.
• Deleted discussions - not sure if that will be at the bottom of this page, or on a linked separate page, but there will be a way for admins to view the list of deleted discussions in the forum. [In ForumNG, nothing is 'really' deleted straight away - only marked as deleted, so admins can still see it. It can be really-deleted after 30 days, or not at all if you're feeling flush with DB space.]

Another exciting progress update next week! Maybe.

Two posts for the price of one today - I wanted to plug Hawthorn chat.

Hawthorn is a personal project of mine - it wasn't developed in work time. It's an open source (GPL) text chat system designed to be unbelievably simple (to use, not to install) with virtually no features and high performance. It doesn't work on its own; you need to integrate it with an existing website that has an authentication/logon system.

Here's some of the reasons you might be interested in it if you want to add text chat to a website that you run:

• Hawthorn has no features except text chat (group chat, one box). There's nothing for users to learn.
• It is, hopefully, extremely fast; and doesn't place any load at all on your existing server.
• No browser plugins are required; it's all JavaScript. (The server-side runs in Java, but users don't need to have Java installed.)
• It can be integrated into JSP or PHP web applications using the provided libraries, or into virtually any other platform if you do it 'from scratch'.

And last but not least...

• It comes with built-in support for Moodle! This installs as a course block and allows either coursewide chat, or group chat, or both. Supports groupings, too.

Check out the PDF that comes with the download if you want to learn more; the documentation's quite extensive.

Although I didn't develop this as a work project, we're evaluating this for possible use here. At present though I don't think anyone has tested this on any kind of scale so be a bit cautious if you do try it.

PS Google Wave? Screw that noise...

Okay, it's not really the start. I did a lot of back-end implementation before. But I've just begun the serious development phase for the new Moodle forum we're developing, 'forumng'.

(Just to clarify for anyone not aware of the situation: we are developing a new forum independently, for our Moodle 1.9-based system. This is not going to be included directly in standard Moodle. However there is a prospect that our new forum might be considered for inclusion somewhere in the Moodle 2.x series.)

Since the 'basic' part of the back-end was done, this week I've been focusing on the next task on the list: getting email (subscription) support to work. It turns out that this is a pain in the backside to test when you have literally no user interface. However, I've managed to do this using the utility I built for load testing which creates forums, discussions, etc.

I've been taking lots of code from the existing forum, and then changing it to fit in with my new infrastructure. That leaves the code almost entirely different, but should still mean that behaviour is rather similar to the current forum. The worst bit was digests where all my assumptions were wrong. Yay!

• I assumed digests were sent out at an arbitrary time per-forum. They're not, the time is specified and it is done across the system.
• I assumed this time would be the same for everyone. In fact, in the current system, if digest time is 17:00 then it is sent out at 17:00 in each individual's timezone. Because this would be a right pain in the backside to implement, I decided not to bother; in forumng it always uses server time. I didn't see that much extra value in the current behaviour, especially as most sites relate to only one timezone.
• I assumed digests were sent per-forum. They're not, they're sent per-course. (They do only include forum messages though and not anything from other activities! Phew.)

As a result I had to change my data model in this area, although the good news is that I was able to throw away one table altogether.

Anyhow it all appears to work now, but I guess I wanted to post because (a) this is what I've been doing for most of the week, and (b) there's a moral to the story: I don't personally use digest mode. That means I don't know how it works and any assumptions I make are liable to be wrong! And they were.

PS I'd be interested in stats for how many people actually use digest mode. Here's a query that works in Postgres:

select 100.0 * (select count(1) from mdl_user where maildigest<>0) / (select count(1) from mdl_user) AS percentage

Our percentage is... drum roll... 0.1%! Ho hum. But to be fair, we don't exactly make it easy for people to edit their user profile options.

(I thought I'd start with a long technical post just to scare off any non-geek readers! Well, maybe that wasn't the reason, but.)

My advice for any organisation that has developers working on customisations to Moodle code is to keep your changes to a minimum. Completely new code that plugs in - new modules, new admin reports, new blocks - is fine, go crazy. But try as hard as possible not to change existing Moodle core code, even if that means telling your users 'no we can't do that'.

Here's where it came up this week - our quiz module. Oh, dear gods, our quiz module. I'm not particularly enamoured of the fact that we've renamed it 'iCMA' (obviously somebody thinks that's a much snappier name than 'quiz') but hey, that was a local language file, so it didn't cause a difference from Moodle core code. Great!

Unfortunately the eighteen million other things we've changed in quiz did cause a difference from Moodle core code. We have custom navigation, custom statistics, custom reports, custom interface, custom question banks, custom grade calculation, custom ARGH. Some of this is kind of based on work which we were sort of hoping would go into Moodle 2.0 and become standard. But what's actually ended up in Moodle 2 is probably going to be a bit different, won't cover all of it, and is still at least a year away! (From becoming the OU's Moodle platform, that is. I'm not speculating on the public Moodle 2 release date. If you need more information on that, please see this definitive reference.)

The changes to our quiz module are so significant that - unlike every other area of code - we've given up merging bugfixes and other modifications from the Moodle 1.9 'stable' branch - there are so many changes it's impossible to merge without somebody completely expert in the system. While the rest of our platform is just moving to 1.9.4, I don't know where the quiz is, 1.9.1 with bits of 1.9.4? Nightmare.

In this particular case somebody was a little bit over-eager when merging in the 1.9.4 changes. They noticed that one file in quiz actually didn't have any OU custom changes! What an opportunity! So they merged the core changes for that file.

Unfortunately, that file turned out to call a function in another file - which had been newly added in 1.9.4, but hadn't been merged in, because the myriad OU changes already in that file made it too complicated.

For now I have fixed this by de-merging the changes and going back to the older version, which presumably means that we are again suffering from a bug which is fixed in standard Moodle. Yay.

So in summary, this is what we did. Don't do it.

Oh and the solution above might sound a bit short-term, but no worries - I have a long-term plan too. It is 'Wait for Tim to get back here and let him fix it'.