Posted
3 days
ago
Our Moodle demonstration site is now using Moodle 1.9.7 (thanks to Moodle HQ sys admin Jordan for upgrading) and has demo account passwords FunMood1ing! which fulfil the default password policy i.e. at least 8 characters and including at least one
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number, one lowercase letter, one uppercase letter and one non-alphanumeric character.
The security overview report (in Site Administration > Reports > Security overview) includes a report of any roles, permissions overrides and users who are allowed to backup user data. It is recommended that the capability to backup user data is only allowed for people who really need it, and their accounts should be protected by strong passwords. Note that glossary and database activity entries can easily be moved to a different course using the export and import entries feature without needing to backup user data.
The security overview report also reports that a password salt has been set.
Of course these demo site security improvements aren't strictly necessary, since the database and files are erased and restored to a clean state every hour, however hopefully they serve to set a good example. [Less]
Posted
4 days
ago
by
nos...@example.com (Dan Poltawski)
Its less than a week till 16 of us (moodle developers) meet up in the Czech Republic for the first Moodle Hackfest!
I'm really excited, the opportunity to to hack and plan together is a unique opportunity and something we tend to miss at
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moots as we chat to fellow Moodlers and find out what our users are interested in, drink Mojitos and don't get so much coding done!
I had hoped to spend a few weeks bug squashing, but sadly my life got in the way.
In any case i'm very interested to hear what you love and hate about Moodle at the moment so the developer community can come up with ways to resolve your problems. If you hate moodle, please tell me why, how can we improve it?
ps. please keep your fingers crossed, I've spent months negotiating a new house which I am hoping to own the day I fly to prague! [Less]
Posted
4 days
ago
Half a year ago Andrea asked to review the old Dialogue module. I have found and reported several problems in it, unfortunately I did not like some design decisions and in the end decided to create a new module instead of fixing problems directly in
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Dialogue.
Consultation module is similar to Dialog but it is more targeted at teacher-student communication. Capability overrides allow it to work in student-student mode too.
Features and differences:
1-1 communication contained in one course (forum is designed for more users)
included in course backup (messaging is not backed up)
optional limit of inquiries per student
notification block
recommended coding style (suitable example for new developers)
optionally teachers may review and interrupt communication of other users
The latest version may be downloaded from contrib CVS now or later as zip package. Please note it is compatible only with the latest 1.9.7 release or later.
Development of this module was funded by Italian Moodle partner MediaTouch 2000 Srl and Technical University of Liberec, Centre of Continuing Education. [Less]
Posted
6 days
ago
Over the last few weeks I've mainly been having to concentrate on fixing bugs in our upcoming release and indeed our current live system (argh, quiz), but I managed to squeeze in work on a couple of new forum features. I've made another very short
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screencast to demonstrate them.
Watch the screencast now (6MB, ~3 mins)
Some notes:
This screencast uses the standard Moodle theme, which is a lot less pretty than the Open University one! (Thanks to our excellent graphic designers.) I thought it would be nice to show how it looks on standard Moodle one time.
These two features were added based (respectively) on student and tutor responses to our existing pilots, and on earlier feature requests from tutors.
This is in our March release but if you're a student or tutor at the OU and you're wondering when you get to use this forum, the answer is probably not 'March'! Sorry.
If on the other hand you work at another institution that uses Moodle - we haven't yet updated the community release of ForumNG to include these features, so don't download it tomorrow and get disappointed. We'll be updating the community release around end of year, hopefully after that it will keep pace directly with our development.
Hope this was at least a little bit interesting! As usual, there will be more screencasts whenever we have more features to show. Given all the bugfixing that's going on recently, I'm not quite sure when that will be... [Less]
Posted
6 days
ago
The Moodle HQ team in Perth is increasing in size and now includes six developers. The latest addition is Andrew Davis, who has been helping out with QA and small bug fixes since he began a fortnight ago.
Meanwhile, European HQ members are
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looking forward to the upcoming Moodle hackfest in the Czech Republic in a week's time, where no doubt Moodle 2.0 will be the hot topic of conversation. Also on the agenda for discussion is Moodle 3.0! [Less]
Posted
10 days
ago
Our documentation wiki, Moodle Docs, has a nice feature for users browsing in one of the 27 languages other than English. If you view a page which is not yet translated, a message is displayed encouraging you to translate it and also providing a link
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to the English version of the page e.g. http://docs.moodle.org/nl/backup/restore. Thanks to Moodle developer and Czech language pack maintainer David Mudrák for figuring out how to do this (MDLSITE-90).
This feature came up in our developer chat when deciding upon the wording of the 1.9.7 upgrade notification message. Rather than having lots of explanatory text in Moodle, a neater solution is simply to include a documentation link. [Less]
Posted
13 days
ago
A heads up for anyone upgrading to the latest Moodle 1.9.6+, you'll find the password policy (in Site Administration > Security > Site policies) has been enabled and admins will be prompted to change their password on next login. Thus, if your site is for testing purposes only, you may wish to disable the password policy.
Posted
14 days
ago
I asked Ray if he would make a screencast about his new ForumNG features, and (after a little bit of convincing) he agreed! Finally, some variety in this blog.
Play screencast (note: will not work in IE7 - please use Firefox or
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IE8).
The screencast covers three minor features in about four minutes. The features will be included in the OU's March update.
Permalink (posts are always shown within discussions, but this gives you a link to the discussion with #p1231312 or whatever so that it jumps straight to the post and expands it automatically)
Important posts (moderators etc. can mark a post as important, this makes it a different colour and adds an ! icon)
Alert (if somebody posts an offensive message, students can report it; this directly sends email to a nominated person so they can check)
Ray was a bit negative about it but I think the screencast is really great! However it did take him a long time (mostly outside work time) to make, which isn't really fair, so I probably won't ask him to do another one... at least not for quite a while.
Two notes for those considering using our forum at other institutions:
1) The screencast shows our version, but outside the Open University, default text on the 'Alert' form obviously won't mention the OU or our code of conduct. Instead there is generic text that should be suitable everywhere. You can replace the text with something specific to the institution using a local language file, which is what we've done here.
2) We haven't updated the community version with these features yet - going to do a batch update around the end of the year or start of next. [Less]
Posted
16 days
ago
Today I have been learning about password salting, a method of making encrypted passwords more secure and practically impossible to crack. Please see the documentation Password salting for the collected wisdom of posters in the forum discussion
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Moodle Salting and in our developer chat.
Elsewhere in Moodle Docs, I loved a talk page comment regarding a typo fix from documentation writer Chris Collman to Tim Hunt:
Keep doing the heavy lifting, sometimes I will find a grain of sand to put in the right place. [Less]
Posted
17 days
ago
A couple of weeks ago I came across an interesting report about the Open University (OU) and Moodle, The Open University UK: creating a win-win situation by sharing code and content. The report explained how cooperating with the worldwide Moodle
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community resulted in everyone benefiting.
Following his return to the UK after working at Moodle HQ in Perth for twelve months, Quiz module maintainer Tim Hunt has continued to contribute to Moodle in lots of areas. In addition to writing the documentation Development:Security, Tim has recently created a Custom SQL queries admin report.
OU wiki, OU blog and conditional activities developer Sam Marshall has recently announced ForumNG (new alternative forum for moodle 1.9). Like Tim, Sam is also a particularly helpful Moodler in the Using Moodle forums. For details of what other OU developers are currently working on, please see Sam's development update blog post.
A big thank you to all the OU team for their contributions to Moodle. [Less]
