David Mudrak's blog

Latest stable version 1.9.7+

There were 13 commits into the stable branch last week. Dan Marsden fixed a bug in importing SCORM 2004 packages (MDL-21584). Tim Hunt fixed the random order of responses shown in their history (MDL-21701). Dan Poltawski committed a set of patches fixing various bugs here and there, including gradebook overview report and hidden role assignments during metacourse sync (MDL-20683, MDL-20993, MDL-21192, MDL-21284, MDL-21424, MDL-21593, MDL-20626). Helen Foster fixed the explanation of the course maximum upload size (MDL-21546). Finally, Eloy Lafuente fixed the wrong time display in logs exported into Excel format (MDL-14934).

Unstable development version 2.0dev

There are 44 commits into the main development branch (future Moodle 2.0) from the last week. Some bigger projects (like Eloy’s new backup and restore subsystem or Tim’s new question engine) are cooked in separate git branches and are waiting for their Merging Day to come yet. Petr Škoda started to work on enrolments and capabilities evaluation improvements (MDL-21655). Guys in Perth continue their work on webservices, HTML output rendering and other parts of the new code.

Quotes of the week

“There is really no pressing reason to choose a particular weekly [build] and label it 1.9.8 and spending time on all the release process that entails.”
– Tim Hunt

“Help files are tooltips, not the manual.”
– David Mudrak

Hello, can you speak Moodle?

Almost a year ago, our translation coordinator Koen Roggemans started a discussion on how to improve the translation process in Moodle. The thing evolved into quite a big project that tries to deal with the most important issues immediately and to open the way for sorting out the others in the future. The research, proposals and progress are documented at Development:Languages. When Moodle 2.0 beta is released, there will be a central portal prepared. This central portal is part of new AMOS system to store and organise the strings and their translations. Its main job is to take care of string versions tracking and branching, so Moodle translators do not need to deal with strings that are not used any more, they can be notified when new strings are added or even changed in the English source etc.

Interesting and important discussion started as a response to the proposal to replace current help files (stored in separate HTML files) with their significantly shortened versions (maintained as normal strings). Some (of us, have to say) consider help file as a short tooltip that should shortly explain the usage of the given page element – in several sentences, one or two paragraphs of text at most. Anything else, like detailed explanation of the feature, step by step tutorials etc, should be moved into our wiki docs. There are objections against this, though. Some of our Moodle Partners pointed out that Internet connectivity may be issue for some institutions running local Moodle servers and moving the information from help files (which are available locally from the server) to the remote wiki server would actually make them not-available.

Post scriptum

The snow is slowly melting and the spring unstoppably comes. :wq