Today I've done the first proper release of three Open University contributed modules for Moodle 2.2. You can get all these from our public GitHub repository site:
Click into the appropriate repository:
- moodle-mod_forumng (ForumNG)
- moodle-mod_ouwiki (OU wiki)
- moodle-mod_oublog (OU blog)
- moodle-local_ousearch (OU search back-end, supports all three)
Within each repository you will find a readme (scroll down to see it) with information about the plugin. To install a module, use the 'Download' button; unpack the zip file; rename the folder inside the zipfile (e.g. rename 'moodle-mod_oublog' folder to 'oublog') and put it in the right place in your Moodle install.
I have also gone through the somewhat tedious process of adding these to the new Moodle plugins repository as well, so you can probably also get them from the official site instead (this may save you the rename step mentioned). At time of writing, they haven't been approved there yet, but I'm sure that will happen soon.
Important cautions:
- These are now considered beta versions (as opposed to the alpha versions I put out before). They have had some testing, but still not (quite) live use with students.
- Nobody's lately checked them on a standard Moodle install or when using MySQL as a 'database'. (OU moodle is now actually pretty much a standard Moodle 2.1.x, just with a huge stack of plugins added, so hopefully it should be fine, but.)
- We can't offer individual support. Please don't contact me if you have problems with them - try to get peer support from suitable moodle.org forums (it's possible I might reply there, if I have time). However, if you find a bug, please do feel free to report it in the appropriate area of the Moodle tracker.
I hope we will release release-quality versions at some point after our next mid-October release so that from that point, these publicly released versions can be the same as our live ones.
Comments
My Moodle iPhone App
Hi Sam,
I've just seen that there is a 'My Moodle' app for the iphone, which would be very useful for me. What is the address for the OU moodle server, and do I just use my OU login as per the Student Home page?
Apologies if this is not the right place to ask or if I am jumping the gun for something you are working on!
Thanks in advance,
Neil Hopkins (nh4277)
OU wiki
Hi Sam, Nice module. We are using at Sussex and we think it is a significant improvement on the standard Moodle wiki. However, I note that the DB table needs a timemodified and time created field to be consistent with other modules. At Sussex we use this field in our recent updates feeds. Cheers, PaoloNew comment
Neil: I'm not sure if you will see this reply, but the Moodle iPhone app won't work with OU Moodle (not even if you are on the servers that use VLE2). We use custom modules and features that mean the standard app would not be very useful.
I'm not responsible for mobile support but my understanding is that the current OU VLE strategy is that, rather than using single-platform apps we will make a quality mobile web view for the key parts of our website that works on all major smartphone platforms (Android and iOS being the ones currently tested).
upgrade path from OUWiki on Moodle 1.9?
Greetings from the University of Canberra Sam. Many of our teaching staff have been very happily using OUWiki on Moodle 1.9 for the past couple of years. We're about to upgrade to 2.1 and we're hoping that these OUWikis will survive the transition. Can you offer any advice on what to reasonably expect? regards, Alanwhere to see forumng in action?
Hi, very interesting - is it possible to see forumng in action with many posts anywhere?New comment
Alan: The upgrade from 1.9 is supposed to work (you should probably install the new ouwiki code into moodle 2 before running the system upgrade, otherwise it will not know what to do with the old ouwiki data) however we have not tested this as we did not use it here.
I'm afraid this is an at-your-own-risk sort of area - so please be sure to try it on a test server first. If you find reproducible bugs, you can ask me to look at them.
New comment
Bughunter: ForumNG on Moodle 1.9 can be seen on our OpenLearn site. For example, this forum. In order to see its features, such as how read tracking works, you will need to register an account (free, needs email) and log in. Of course this will only give you student access and not to the moderation features (split/merge posts, move/copy discussion, delete/undelete post or discussion, view post edit history, etc).
If you are concerned about performance it may help to know that we use ForumNG on our main OU site for course websites (only available to students). Again this is still in 1.9 at present. Last month there were over 300,000 new posts to ForumNG forums across our system.
There are no publicly accessible sites using ForumNG on Moodle 2 that I'm aware of.
Unsure about versions
Hi Sam. We're looking to push out 2.2 in the Feb half term (about 2 weeks as I write this) and am looking over the plugins we have to see if there are newer versions available. For OU Wiki, we currently have installed version 2011031800 called "stable R2.4", however the version available in the OU github repo is newer in terms of the version number (2011112900) but seems older as it's described as "unstable development version". Can I confirm that the 'unstable dev version' is indeed the most recent version, despite sounding older? Cheers, Paul.New comment
'Unstable development version' usually indicates the newest version there is! And this is no exception. Yes it's newest. (In fact I didn't think we were doing the 'Stable Rx.y' stuff at all in the Moodle 2 plugins yet...)
Unfortunately I have been really short of time lately. I'm sort of hoping to make a stable branch MOODLE_21_STABLE for all these plugins that doesn't just get bugfixes/features as soon as a we code them, only when actually tested. But have not had time yet...
--sam