Personal Blogs

For my first blog post of the year, I thought I'd just give a brief rundown on the current issues (features and fixes) that I've coded and are waiting in the review process for core Moodle. I'm afraid this isn't a barrel of laughs, but at least it's informational.

Admittedly this is partly because I want to encourage HQ developers to review things, but also partly because I thought other people from the Moodle community might be interested in some of these changes! Feel free to vote on issues if you like them.

All these issues are ones seen as vitally important by our staff for various reasons.

Features (for 2.3):

• MDL-29624 Media embedding should be consistent and customisable
  At the moment, there are three totally separate mechanisms for embedding audio/video/Flash: the media filter, the File module, and the 'preview' window used when uploading video files. The latter two cannot be customised by any plugin.
  This change standardises it so that all three places use the same system, and also makes it so that the embedding can be customised by writing code inside a custom theme. For example, if you want to change the Flash player used to embed video, or to support different formats, this would become possible without having to change core Moodle.
• MDL-31121 File resource: option to display size, type
  A couple of tickboxes on the File resource form; if you turn them on, then on the course page where it shows the link to the file, it also shows e.g. '24.1MB PDF document' in small text.

Bugfixes (for 2.1+):

• MDL-31122 Navigation block: hide weeks that just contain Label
  The navigation block already does not include course weeks that have no activities, because that would be stupid (you can't navigate to them). But, currently it does contain weeks that have a Label and nothing else. This change fixes that.
• MDL-31015 File/URL resource: 'Open' option doesn't work reliably
  If you choose 'Open' display type on a File or URL resource (meaning, open the file or go to the link immediately), this only works when the link is clicked from the main page. If you click it from navigation, ctrl-click to open in new tab, or open in any other way, you get an intermediate page with the link on, which you then have to click again to get the file/URL.
  Users really hate this because it's like 'I clicked a link to go to the URL - now it's telling me to click a link to go to the URL! that's what I just did!'
  This change simplifies the code (removing a chunk of JavaScript) and makes it so the 'Open' display type always works, wherever you come from.

Exciting, no? Okay, no. Still, now you know.

Finally, just as a reminder - if anyone uses any of the OU's custom modules for Moodle 2, please do make sure to keep up with the relevant GitHub repositories in case there are bugfixes that are important to you. (If you do upgrade as a result, don't forget to check the new version on a test server first.) And incidentally, developers working for the company NetSpot recently submitted a few bugfixes to those modules too, so thanks for that. You can see their contributions in the git history.