Edited by Sam Marshall, Friday, 23 Oct 2009, 21:14
Today was our code freeze for the December 1st release. As usual, various things were delayed, but I did actually manage to finish a few new features for ForumNG. (Not as many as I'd hoped - unfortunately, what with me going on holiday and then various necessary bug fixing tasks, there was only about two weeks of development on new features. Don't know exactly how much development there was, because, er, I'm late with updating the schedule page... ah well...)
Anyhow, here are the new features since last time I posted to this blog:
Administrators can now choose to unsubscribe users (from the list of subscribed users). This was kind of supposed to be there already, but I'd forgotten to implement it.
There's a Collapse all link on discussion pages. It's no use to man nor beast, but people were disturbed by seeing the Expand all without its mirror image.
Moderators (by default; anyone with the appropriate capability) now get to ignore limits on posting. For example, the forum can be set to allow posting only from a certain date; now, moderators are allowed to post before that date.
And the big one - save draft. We had a customisation to existing Moodle forums that let you save draft posts. (There were lots of problems with it, too, but let's not go there.) ForumNG didn't have this, but people wanted it back, and their wish is my requirements list!
The new save draft is a lot nicer than the old one. You can conveniently use it either because you want to leave a message and finish it tomorrow, or because you're halfway through a long post and are (probably justly) paranoid that the system will crash and lose all your work. Anyhow, rather than explain how it works, I've made a 3 minute screencast to demonstrate it.
In order to see the screencast you need to be using Firefox or some other nice browser that will display .swf files that are linked to. This is because I'm too lazy to set up a proper web page for it.
Enjoy! (Well, or just bear it. It's only three minutes.)
PS If you're a member of OU internal staff you can probably see the documentation page for this update. Not available for tutors or students or anyone outside the OU, sorry. (But if you read this blog you know it already! Just in a bit less detail.)
December ForumNG release update - save draft
Today was our code freeze for the December 1st release. As usual, various things were delayed, but I did actually manage to finish a few new features for ForumNG. (Not as many as I'd hoped - unfortunately, what with me going on holiday and then various necessary bug fixing tasks, there was only about two weeks of development on new features. Don't know exactly how much development there was, because, er, I'm late with updating the schedule page... ah well...)
Anyhow, here are the new features since last time I posted to this blog:
And the big one - save draft. We had a customisation to existing Moodle forums that let you save draft posts. (There were lots of problems with it, too, but let's not go there.) ForumNG didn't have this, but people wanted it back, and their wish is my requirements list!
The new save draft is a lot nicer than the old one. You can conveniently use it either because you want to leave a message and finish it tomorrow, or because you're halfway through a long post and are (probably justly) paranoid that the system will crash and lose all your work. Anyhow, rather than explain how it works, I've made a 3 minute screencast to demonstrate it.
In order to see the screencast you need to be using Firefox or some other nice browser that will display .swf files that are linked to. This is because I'm too lazy to set up a proper web page for it.
That said, here's the link.
December release features (...i.e. save as draft) screencastVideo player: forumng-savedraft.swfEnjoy! (Well, or just bear it. It's only three minutes.)
PS If you're a member of OU internal staff you can probably see the documentation page for this update. Not available for tutors or students or anyone outside the OU, sorry. (But if you read this blog you know it already! Just in a bit less detail.)