David Mudrak's blog

Latest stable version 1.9.8+

There are 17 commits into the stable branch from the last week. Tim Hunt fixed a silly bug that led to bad performance problems in the grader report (MDL-22098). Andrew Davis fixed a regression in the gradebook overview report so it displays hidden items correctly now (MDL-21218). Iñaki Arenaza committed new upstream version of phpCAS library (MDL-20029).

Unstable development version 2.0dev

There are 70 commits into the main development branch from the last week. Martin Dougiamas has set-up Moodle 2.0-beta release day in HQ planning calendar to May 3rd 2010 and the team is focussing on bringing Moodle 2.0 beta down onto the runway. Hopefully the wind conditions are good for clear landing.

Quotes of the week

“What happened to ‘We will release a solid product when it is done.’ ???”
– Tim Hunt thinks we should not promise any release dates

“Just 10 secs ago, by mistake, I emptied the block_instances table completely. It’s amazing how better Moodle 2.0 looks without blocks! A M A Z I N G !”
– Eloy Lafuente improves the look and feel of future Moodle version

“Most of the things I put in Moodle to push my view of courses as communities have been ground down over the years.”
– Martin Dougiamas stands alone against the world

The role who must not be named

While working on help files clean-up, Helen Foster re-opened an internal discussion on the “official” Moodle terminology. How should the role archetypes teacher and student be called in help and documentation? It is clear that these two do not fit everybody — for example when Moodle is used for company training. Martin hates the model these two terms promote and would prefer if Moodle highlighted course scenarios based on facilitation and moderation, instead of teaching. But it is difficult to come up with a word that would work for university and corporate as well as schools. There is an issue with using participant for students, too. As Helen noted, teachers are also participants, learning from their students so the term should be used for all users that have some role assigned in the course.
This question is not new kid on the block. We talked long and hard about this years ago and ended up having different people using different words in different places, says Martin. The point is that neither moderator nor participant are really used in common forums-speak. Folks tend to use teacher for the person who knows and student is the person that does not know, although the underlying principle of Moodle doesn’t work that way, Tomaz points.
Years have jaded me, sighs Martin. As our benevolent dictator for life, he makes an executive decision to use participants for all people with a role, teachers for people with some sort of a facilitation/editing role, students for people primarily there to learn, and users for people across the site. Dammit, everyone knows what they mean, he closes.
In the new translation interface I am currently finishing (to be available together with Moodle 2.0-beta), there is a way how to quickly filter all strings containing a given phrase. I can imagine Moodle partners offering a customized language packs for various clients (schools, universities, business) with all these keywords searched and replaced.

Post scriptum

make install && not war