Personal Blogs

Edit: This post is now out of date and there are new versions available on our GitHub site - see newer posts.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.