Moodle 1.9: Cached File Downloads August 4, 2008
Posted by Kenneth Newquist in Moodle, Web Applications.Tags: bugs, moodle19
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This isn’t so much a bug as an undocumented feature that we don’t really want.
If you upload a file to Moodle (for example, a Word document) as a file resource, download that file, make a change to it, re-upload it, and then re-download it … you won’t get the changed file you were expecting, because the original download’s been saved to your web browser’s cache.
Web browsers like to keep copies of all the files they download in a cache. The idea is that this speeds up your surfing experience — why download something again when you just downloaded it a minute ago? So what’s happening is that your web browser is snagging the file and making a secretive copy of it deep with in its cache (a copy separate from the one you saved to your desktop or downloads folder). When you upload a changed file and then try and re-download it, the web browser looks at the copy it secreted away instead of the one that’s one the server.
Fortunately Moodle has a way around this, by setting the $CFG->filelifetime variable in config.php to 1 second. This causes the file’s “life time” to become exceedingly short, thus forcing your web browser to go and get a new copy instead of the original.
I’ve found that Firefox is better about listening to such “don’t cache this file” orders than Internet Explorer is, so if you continue to see this behavior in IE, try using Firefox instead.
Moodle 1.9: Images in question don’t display July 31, 2008
Posted by Kenneth Newquist in Moodle, Web Applications.Tags: bugs, moodle19
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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.
Moodle 1.9: Forum Timewarp Redux July 17, 2008
Posted by Kenneth Newquist in Moodle, Web Applications.Tags: bugs, hackdocfest, moodle19
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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 1.9: Use simplepie instead of magpie for rss parsing July 17, 2008
Posted by Kenneth Newquist in Moodle, Web Applications.Tags: bugs, hackdocfest, moodle19
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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
Moodle 1.9: Assign weights to all categories on one screen in Gradebook July 16, 2008
Posted by Kenneth Newquist in Uncategorized.Tags: bugs, moodle19, moodlehackdoc
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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
Moodle 1.9: Online Assignment Truncates text at 64k July 16, 2008
Posted by Kenneth Newquist in Uncategorized.Tags: bugs, hackdocfest, moodle19
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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 1.9: Get a fully working HTML editor in Moodle July 16, 2008
Posted by Kenneth Newquist in Moodle, Web Applications.Tags: bugs, moodle19, moodlehackdoc
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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
Moodle 1.9: Summaries aren’t imported into courses July 15, 2008
Posted by Kenneth Newquist in Moodle, Web Applications.Tags: bugs, moodle19, moodlehackdoc
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There’s a feature/bug in Moodle 1.9 where course summaries aren’t imported into a new course. There’s a hack to get around this (more on that soon) but the powers that be are also working on a new flag to allow people to chose to import summaries (rather than defaulting to NOT including them).
http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-8848
MDL-8848 has a patch for the “summaries missing when importing course” bug; I’ve tested it, and commented on the thread asking if any more testing/development is needed.
Moodle 1.9: “Add Blocks” block doesn’t use standard formatting July 1, 2008
Posted by Kenneth Newquist in Moodle, Web Applications.Tags: bugs, moodle19
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This is a minor issue, but it created problems in our custom theme.
Most blocks in Moodle use this XHTML code:
<div class=”header”><div class=”title”><h2>Upcoming Events</h2>
However, the “Blocks” block,which appears when you turn editing on, and which is used to add blocks to a course, does not follow this scheme. Instead, it looks like this:
<div class=”header”>Blocks</div>
This causes problems with themes which are expecting the convention used with other blocks (the H2 tag in the other block was apparently added for accessibility reasons). In order to bring this block into line with the others, I’ve suggested a patch (available via Tracker), which adds the appropriate div and H2 tags to the header div.
http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-15501
Moodle 1.9: Categories and formulas being lost in gradebook June 30, 2008
Posted by Kenneth Newquist in Moodle, Web Applications.Tags: bugs, moodle19
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There’s a bug in Moodle 1.9 dealing with “restoring an existing course in 1.9.1 to a new course in 1.9.1 on same server results in categories and formulas being lost in gradebook”.
Sounds nasty. Tracker report here:
http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-15160
I haven’t verified it myself yet, but it’s officially on the list.
