Learning the World

The Moodle 1.9.2 stable release includes a bug that breaks images in quizzes:

Tracker: Images in question don’t display
http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-15792

The fix is simple, and is included in the Moodle 1.9.2+ weekly build, but if you have the stable 1.9.2 release you’ll need to patch it yourself. This bug bit us yesterday after we upgraded to 1.9.2 and a faculty member called wondering where the images in his math placement tests went. Fortunately I was able to patch the file in question quickly and get the tests back up and running.

TinyMCE and CKEditor (formerly FCKeditor) are two of the most popular open source WYSIWYG editors for web applications. I’m researching which would be the best to implement at the day job on a campus-wide basis; ideally I’d like to pick one editor, and then use it with all of our web apps. Here’s a run down of what editors are available for what apps:

In doing my research, I found a few WYSIWYG editor comparisons:

• IQ Content: WYSIWYG Text Editors Reviewed
• Drupal.org: Comparision of Drupal 5 WYSIWYG Editors
• WebTecker: FCKEditor vs. TinyMCE

I polled Twitter as well, and got four responses in favor of using CKEditor over TinyMCE, mostly because of ease of use.

Unfortunately, my comparisons didn’t yield any easy answers. WordPress defaults to TinyMCE, and if we go with WordPress Mu on campus, that could end up being our single biggest use of a WYSIWYG editor. Moodle is currently using HTMLArea, which is no longer in development. They’re replacing it with a modular system in Moodle 2 that lets you choose between whatever editor you want (including TinyMCE and CKEditor) so I’m not too concerned about that. The lack of support for TinyMCE in Mediawiki is troublesome; there is an extension for it, but it’s been abandoned by the developer. CKEditor support is much better.

We don’t need to rush into a decision here, so I think my next step will be to setup TinyMCE and CKEditor on test instances of Drupal and see how well they work and play with the CSS, how well their code validates, and how they deal with cutting and pasting text from various word processors.

If anyone has any suggestions regarding these editors, I’d love to hear them.

We got a heads up from our Apple rep today that there are a few hundred students headed our way this fall with spiffy new Apple computers … and the free iPod Touches that came with them. Now this is very cool for them (and far cooler than the last-gen nano that came with my MacBook Pro last year) but the sudden arrival of a bunch of new wireless handheld devices has us scrambling a bit. Will the wireless network accommodate them (short answer: yes, with plenty of room to spare). Will our web applications work with them? (probably).

Fortunately, we got an iPod Touch in the office for testing purposes, and I’ll be firing that puppy up ASAP to make sure everything’s working the way it should.

Moodle 1.9.2 is out, fixing a handful of security holes that were announced last week. Read about the changes then download it here.

A Moodle bug we reported back during the first Hack/Doc Fest is still hanging on (”Course restores for non-admin users appear ~7 years early”). I’ve run through the bug in Moodle 1.9.2 and confirmed that it’s still a problem. I’ve updated the tracker report with a new patch against 1.9.2.

http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-12922

Moodle uses Magpie RSS to its feeds, but more and more feeds are failing in Magpie because it can’t parse their XML (largely because Magpie RSS hasn’t been updated in two years). The solution is to use SimplePie instead.

At the Moodle Hack/Doc Fest at Kenyon, the hackers swapped out Magpie for SimplePie. The patch is available through this tracker report; please vote for the change so that we can get SimplePie integrated into Moodle 2.0.

http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-7946

To use this, you need to do the following:

1. Download the patch and rsslib_ext.php from the Tracker entry. Download SimplePie from the SimplePie web site.
2. Patch [your moodle directory]/blocks/libblock_rss_client_action.php using block_rss_client_action_simplepie.diff
3. Install simplepie by copying the ’simplepie’ folder to [your moodle directory]/lib

The new Moodle 1.9 scatters its category weights to the four winds. We’d like to see them consolidated back down to one page, as they were in Moodle 1.8.

http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-15680

Bob Puffer determined the reason why exceedingly long (9000+ words, 64kb) entries in Journal and Online Text Assignments failed is because the data/text fields in the ‘mdl_journal_entries’ and ”mdl_assignment_submission’ are set to ‘text’ (which has a 64kb limit) vs ‘mediumtext’ (which has a 16mb limit).

The tracker entry for this problem can be found here:
http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-15678

Moodle Tracker report MDL-11113 deals with getting an HTML editor working in Moodle. It’s presently focused on TinyMCE, but the plan appears to be to support multiple editors. The goal is to include this ability in Moodle 2.0, since the existing editor (HTML Area) is no longer being developed by its maintainers.

At Hack/Doc Fest we’re working on creating a patch for getting FCKeditor (now simply CKEditor) working in Moodle 1.9; the general sense is that HTML Area is buggy enough to warrent upgrading.

http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-11113

I’m currently at Kenyon College attending Moodle Hack/Doc Fest II, a liberal arts Moodle coding and documentation ad hoc workshop. We’re tracking our posts/bookmarks/photos etc. using the tag ‘moodlehackdoc’.

You can find my del.icio.us bookmarks for the event here:

http://del.icio.us/tag/moodlehackdoc