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I made a screencast about a new feature I wrote that will be part of Moodle 2.2.

Moodle already has the ability to write descriptions for a resource (link, file, ...) or activity (forum, ...), but these display on a separate screen. Using this new feature, you can choose to display descriptions directly under the link on the course main page.

View the screencast on screencast.com.

Thanks to Moodle HQ - Eloy (code review), Martin (approval, suggestions), Helen (suggestions, wording), Sam Hemelryk (testing). Also to Tim for helping with communication while I was away. And a few other people were involved as well - see the issue MDL-27001 for full details.

A bit of background about this feature - we particularly need it at the OU because in our 1.9 system we had the 'resourcepage' module which let people create pages with lists of files and links for students - and those files and links could have descriptions. Moving to 2.x, we replaced resourcepage with a new 'subpage' module - this lets you do a similar thing, but the key is that it now uses completely standard Moodle resources and activities, just like the course main page. So we had a problem when converting a course from one to the other: the descriptions disappeared. Ooops. Now it should be okay.

You could achieve something similar already by adding labels in all over the place, but the spacing is wrong (the system doesn't know your label is supposed to 'go with' the thing above it, compared to other labels that don't, so the space between is too much) and it's a pain if you ever have to move items (as you now have to move both the link and the label below it).

So, I think the feature should be useful for lots of people - not just us.

And by the way, using this feature doesn't reduce performance when viewing the course page, because when you turn on this option the descriptions are stored in the course 'modinfo' cache.