Learning the World

This Moodle plugin uses a heavily modified version of the IMS Enterprise plugin to integrate Moodle with Banner. I haven’t tried it yet, but one of my goals for the spring semester is to get exactly this sort of integration up and running so I plan on trying it soon.

• Banner/Luminis Message Broker Plugin for Moodle

This bug drove me (and the instructional technologists I work with) more than a little crazy.

If you create a page in the Moodle wiki that includes a pound (#) sign, and then edit that page, Moodle truncates the page name, forking it and creating a new page.

The original page continues to display, but when you go to edit it, the new page appears. If you then save changes and return to the initial wiki page, the changes do not appear (because they were made to the truncated page, not the original one).

Add groups into the mix, and it gets even more fun. We spent a good amount of time chasing our tails before we realized what the problem was.

This bug is already documented in tracker by Dean Thayer:

• MDL-17237: Can’t edit a wiki with a # (hash, number sign, pound sign) in it’s name

Our exact case was a little more involved than this. We had people creating new pages that some how got the original text into the new page, which isn’t behavior I saw in my tests. Yet if I look at the initial page for these wiki pages, I can see that they started with the same text as the initial page, and I don’t think the students or instructor copied text over into the new page.

It’s very odd, but I think it all comes back to that blasted # sign.

One of my design goals for WordPress Mu is to be able to easily support faculty and student photo galleries. One way of doing that is to go with an externally hosted solution like Flickr, and then use a plug-in to pull said photos into WordPress posts.

Slickr is a AJAX-based plug-in for WordPress that does exactly that. It looks good — check out the demo here — but there are some practical problems with it. The biggest is that it bases its galleries on Flickr albums rather than tags. This is fine, except that non-pro, free Flickr accounts are limited to three albums, while you can have an unlimited number of tags.

It’s a useful tool, especially for those who want to have a social networking tie-in to their photo galleries, but unless I pay for pro accounts for my industrial-strength users, it’s not the right solution. Instead, I’m looking at NextGen Gallery, a locally-hosted solution that simple photo galleries, slide shows, and the uploading of zipped files.

The other day I had a problem with MySQL running out of available connections, which in turn caused a large number of errors for Moodle as PHP tried to reach the database and failed. I’ve since upped the number of connections, but my colleagues and are looking at the longer-term improvement of monitoring the number active connections to MySQL using Nagios.

To that end, the college’s Linux admin found this cool article which includes a short perl script to accomplish exactly that.

• Monitor number of active connections to MySQL using Nagios

As I alluded to yesterday, Firefox 3 on the Mac won’t accepted formatted text from other applications (most notably word). While this does mean that users don’t have to deal with the Word<->Firefox 3  extraneous code problem, also means that every document that gets cut and pasted into Firefox 3 is going to come in without any sort of formatting. This is a pain for folks who were used to this functionality in Firefox 2, and I expect that we’ll see more and more complaints about this as Firefox 3 achieves deeper penetration on campus.

There’s a report on this bug in Bugzilla; please vote for it. 

• Clipboard and drag-and-drop don’t interoperate with formatted text (e.g. HTML) on OS X

There’s also a good conversation about the issue, including possible workarounds, at MacRumors.com:

• Copy and Paste removes formatting – why?

Note that Safari on the Mac does not have this problem, but I’ve found Safari support in TinyMCE and CKEditor flaky at best (e.g. when cutting and pasting from Word into Safari using TinyMCE 2.x in Drupal, the resulting text will have random spaces removed from between words).

Update 11/7/2008

The patch that fixes this problem has been committed, so hopefully we’ll see this in production soon!

Firefox 3 for Windows has changed the way it handles copy and pasting text from other applications, such as Word, which in turn is causing extra code to show up in posts to a variety of web apps, including Moodle, Drupal, and WordPress. Firefox 3 for Mac has its own issues (namely it won’t copy/paste rich text from Word at all).

This Moodle Tracker report offers one scenario where the problem pops up. I encountered it earlier in the semester as well, and unfortunately the best workaround I had at the time was to tell folks to use IE to do cutting and pasting if they wanted to preserve their formatting (or copy/pasting into Notepad before pasting into Firefox 3 if they didn’t.

The extra code is style data that Firefox 2 omitted, but Firefox 3 includes:

<!– /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal
{mso-style-parent:”"; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:”Times New
Roman”; mso-fareast-font-family:”Times New Roman”;} span.EmailStyle15
{mso-style-type:personal; mso-style-noshow:yes;
mso-ansi-font-size:10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt; font-family:Arial;
mso-ascii-font-family:Arial; mso-hansi-font-family:Arial;
mso-bidi-font-family:Arial; color:windowtext;} @page Section1
{size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in;
mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;}
div.Section1 {page:Section1;} –> 

Digging around on the web, I found a post (”Pasting from Word in Firefox 3 Doesn’t Remove Meta/Style Tags”) that explains the problem:

The problem is due to that Firefox 3.0 is presenting itself to MS Word as a XML client and the content pasted in the editor has new format different to this one pasted in Firefox 2.0. That is why the regular expressions used by the editor’s Paste From Word filters are not stripping the new MS Word XML formatting. 

I can’t find anything in Bugzilla that speaks to this (my guess is that it would be viewed as a feature rather than a bug).  

My understanding is that there’s always extraneous code coming over from Word, but that the various WYSIWYG editors (TinyMCE, CKEditor) endeavor to strip out said code. The problem, aside from the fact that Firefox 3 has changed the way it does copy and paste, is that the editors haven’t caught up with the changes. I found posts for both editors discussing how to deal with this.

On the CKEditor site, there’s a tracker report about improving the editor itself:

• Ticket #2291: Simple copy & paste from Word document – extra code not stripped

Scheduler, a third-parting appointment scheduling module for Moodle, doesn’t deal properly with Daylight Saving Time. Events spanning the daylight/standard time boundry appear one hour earlier in the scheduler after EDT reverts to EST.

A report for this bug is up in the Scheduler bug tracker (which is independent of Moodle’s own tracker; registration is required to view/comment on this bug)

• Scheduler doesn’t deal with Daylight Savings Time

WordPress Magazine is a new webzine focusing on WordPress; its inaugural issue looks at how to change the popular blogging software’s physical appearance by developing custom themes. There’s not a huge amount of content here yet, but I’ll be keeping an eye on it to see how it evolves.

The Social Media Classroom is an experiment in using Drupal to drive a Web 2.0 classroom. From the web site:

The Social Media Classroom (we’ll call it SMC) includes a free and open-source (Drupal-based) web service that provides teachers and learners with an integrated set of social media that each course can use for its own purposes—integrated forum, blog, comment, wiki, chat, social bookmarking, RSS, microblogging, widgets , and video commenting are the first set of tools.  The Classroom also includes curricular material: syllabi, lesson plans, resource repositories, screencasts and videos. 

Interesting.  It’s based on Drupal 5.x and makes use of a huge number of modules — 61 to be precise. Among those included are activitystream, advanced_profile, chatroom, lightbox2, nodefamily, node review, panels, organic groups, seesmic, tagadelic and many, many more.

I think Drupal is a good fit for this kind of thing, though I’m curious to see how they polished up the Drupal interface to hide the rough edges from students and faculty (which has probably been our biggest stumbling block in using Drupal with our “Soapbox” web app at the college).

I think I’ll throw this on my Mac when I have a chance, but my biggest concern about this is keeping it current. They appear to be doing regular builds based on updates to Drupal’s CVS repository, but I’ve run into problems over the years with one module update mucking up a bunch of other modules. I imagine staying on top of those interactions is going to be a heck of a challenge for the SMC’s developers.