Learning the World

After many, many head->desk moments attempting to install the math homework software WeBWorK on RHEL4, we finally gave up and tried it on Debian, as per the instructions here. That did the trick; our test instance is now up and running and waiting for me to start creating sample courses.

Last week we had a faculty member upload an HTML photo gallery to his course in Moodle. Suddenly, the pages that had looked just fine offline were a mess within Moodle. A little digging revealed that Moodle was adding on the site’s style sheets to the uploaded files. Since the HTML documents in question didn’t have local styles for all of the Moodle ones, the layout exploded.

The reason for this? We had set “filteruploadedfiles” to “all” (this option is located under Administration > Appearance > Filter Settings > Filter uploaded files). When it’s turned on, Moodle will add the site CSS — but not the site headers and footers — to any HTML page that’s been uploaded to it.

It’s also used for automatic linking filters  (glossary, hyperlinks, etc.) so if you turn it off, you’ll lose that sort of filtering on  uploaded HTML pages as well. We don’t anticipate that will be a problem however; the addition of the extra CSS to the page is.

Part of the adventure that is Moodle — or any web app for that matter — is identifying and fixing bugs. Here’s a list of my top Moodle bugs, as of Moodle 1.8.4. A couple of them, like the “Edit Resources” bug, should be fixed in Moodle 1.9. Others are in need of some TLC from the Moodle community, which is why I’m posting them here — in most cases, these bugs have fixes, but they need to be folded into the Moodle code base. Want to help? Then vote and watch this bugs in Tracker, and let folks know that they’re important to you.

Calendar event titles not properly escaped
http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-10633

Forum Digest Emails do not include proper CSS tag
http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-12843

Snoopy mishandles RSS redirects
http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-10483

Group Events do not appear within Course Calendar
http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-9059

Gradebook fails to properly calculate score when using “drop X lowest” and “exclude assignment”
http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-12842

Course restores for non-admin users appear ~7 years early
http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-12922

Flatfile enrollment gives a warning in apache logs and do not collect teacher’s mails
http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-11418

MDL-12555: Getting “Course Module ID was incorrect” error on an Advanced Search in recent activity report.
http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-12555

Edit Resources without previewing
http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-6826

There’s a new listserv for librarians interested in Drupal: DRUPAL4LIB. You can join it via its archives page.It’s great to see there are enough people interested in using Drupal with library web sites to warrant such a list — so far it’s only seeing sporadic traffic, but I intend to start posting once I begin converting Lafayette’s library site to Drupal later this month.

Just as we were ready to kick the tires on Moodle 1.8.3 … Moodle 1.8.4 comes out. In addition to a couple of security fixes, the new version includes a feature that faculty have been asking for: the ability to make scheduled posts. I’m assuming this is a course level thing, but I’ll post more once I’ve got the code installed on our test server.

Other notable fixes (based on problems we encountered in production):

[MDL-9059] – When teacher creates Group event on calendar, they cannot see it
[MDL-9704] – editing teacher loose ability to edit course events
[MDL-11831] – Gradebook will not show all participants when groups are defined, and course group mode is set to no