Moodle Core’s announced a number of big changes to the Moodle gradebook for the 1.9.5 release. Among the changes:

• the student name column is now sticky (which means you can still see if if you scroll to the right to look at additional assignments).
• The categories page has been re-organized and color coded to make things easier to understand.
• Administrators can now reduce the number of grade aggregation methods.
• The Gradebook’s drop-down navigation menu can now be supplemented by tabbed navigation.

There’s a lot of stuff in there. We’re going to be delving into it on a test server just as soon as the code is released to CVS; I’m looking forward to seeing how our usability tests run with this new Gradebook.

The issue appears to be a change in the default settings for the wiki. Making the wiki configuration tweaks described in this Tracker report fixed the problem:

• MDL-10641 Wiki binary files option broken

To start, you need to understand how Moodle tolerates risks based on roles (defined under “Risks” in the Moodle Docs wiki.):

• Guest – only capabilities without any risks are allowed
• Student – certain capabilities with spam risks are allowed
• Teacher – certain capabilities with XSS and privacy risks are allowed
• Administrator – all capabilities are allowed

This is important because any custom roles you’ve created are evaluated based on the legacy role that spawned them. So if you start with a student role, and give it some more advanced teacher-like options that allow XSS capabilities, then Moodle will set a critical warning flag because its exceeded the capabilities normally associated with a student.

I need to doublecheck this, but I think that if you change the legacy role associated with the custom role in question to “teacher”, then your custom capabilities will remain the same, but the report will run against the more permissive teacher role. That said, you may not want to get rid of the warnings (since it is helpful to know what a “super student” role could get themselves into) but at least this write-up should help you understand them.

I’d love to see Moodle create a more user-friendly report that says something like:

• “Your role ‘Teacher Assistant’ is based on the legacy role ‘Student’. By default, students are not allowed to have capabilities that permit Cross Site Scripting (XSS), but your custom role allows the following XSS capabilities” — I’d then include a list of the problem capabilities.

You can contribute to improving the Security Report by reading/commenting on this tracker item:

• MDL-18078: Provide a feedback for the admin in order to explain him/her what to do to fix the security problem rised up by the security report

“overLIB 4.10 or later is required for the CSS Style Plugin”

A little searching revealed that this is apparently a problem with the browser’s cache; clearing the cache causes it to go away. If you’re proxying Moodle, you may need to clear the proxy’s cache as well. There’s no Tracker item for it; I thought of adding one, but this isn’t really a Moodle problem — it’s a browser one.

• moodle.org: Overlib problem (moodle thread discussing the problem and fixes)
• octette.cs.man.ac.uk overLIB 4.10 or later is required for the CSS Style Plugin

I experimented with using NanoGong to do this, but unfortunately it was just too unstable; the Java applet running it refused to save files on two of the three computers I tried it on … including computers on which it had worked.

COVCELLL has created the audio recording assignment that works with Moodle 1.9. I haven’t had a chance to try it yet, and would love to hear from anyone who has.

The problem comes when you try and delete that file — Moodle’s scripts can’t handle the special character, and refuse to allow you to move, delete or otherwise modify the file. Fortunately, a fix is coming in Moodle 1.9.5 thanks to the work of Charles Fulton of Kalamazoo College at Hack/Doc Fest III at Reed College in January 2009.

You can read about it in tracker here:

• MDL-237 Special characters left in filenames after unzipping

A patch is available via tracker. A fix will be available in Moodle 1.9.5.

Moodlerooms, a SaaS provider of Moodle, just launched an application built on the Moodle platform that lets school admins bring Moodle and Google Apps together with a single sign-in. So now, students who told us they didn’t want to sign in to multiple environments – like an LMS to get their course content and a productivity suite like Google Apps to actually do their work – have the answer they’ve wanted.

If you’re wondering about how this is technically done, read on:

Moodlerooms used the industry standard SAML 2.0 and OAuth protocols to securely integrate with Moodle, building on open extensibility features of Google Apps Education Edition. Using these extensibility features, any educational software vendor can take a similar approach to provide user directory synchronization, single sign-on, and user data integration with their service.

This is cool and all, but there is a downside, as illustrated by a recent bug Google accidentally introduced into Google Docs that allowed documents in Google Docs to be shared with anyone you’ve ever shared a doc with. The bug only affected .05% of users, but still it illustrates the potential drawbacks and dangers of using a web cloud-based app like Google Docs. Which isn’t to say that Moodle itself is perfect, but you’re increasing you’re exposure by relying on two web-based apps.

• MDL-15926: WHen clicking on help for scales in forums, ALL the scales are shown, instead of just one (fixed Moodle 1.9.2, verifiedin 1.9.4+)
• Summaries don’t get imported from the source course to the destination course (fixed in Moodle 1.9.5, but available in the weekly 1.9.4+ builds)

The summaries bug has been kicking around for a long time, and is something we worked on at Hack/Doc Fest II at Kenyon College in June 2008, so it’s nice to see it finally make its way into core.

Details on how to swap out Magpie for SImplePie can be found in Moodle Tracker:

• MDL-7946: Use simplepie instead of magpie for rss parsing

This seems like a no brainer swap to me, but the tracker item could still use some vote love. The tracker doesn’t mention it, but this problem still affects Moodle 1.9.4.

For example S(n) gets turned into an S with a “NO” icon. There are two problems here — S(n) is a legitimate mathmatical formula, so it shouldn’t compete with emoticons. Also, (n) is a pretty obscure emoticon, so it throws people for a loop when they accidentally trigger it.

The emoticon can’t be disabled on the course level, but it can be disabled site wide, per this tracker item:

• MDL-11444: A way to disable emotions

In short, you go to Admin > Appearance > HTML Editor and can then edit a list of emoticons. Here’s a list of the problem emoticons that I’ve disabled within my install of Moodle.

• (y) = yes
• (n) = no
• (heart) = heart
• (h) = heart