David Mudrak's blog

Latest stable version 1.9.8+

There are 10 commits into the stable branch from the last week. Half of them, committed by Dan Marsden, deal with various SCORM issues (MDL-22168, MDL-22046, MDL-21568, MDL-18202, MDL-21444). Tim Hunt fixed three Quiz issues (MDL-22241, MDL-20586, MDL-22257). Thanks to Gordon Bateson, Hotpot module now uses HTML OBJECT tag instead of IFRAME, due to XHTML 1.0 strict compatibility (MDL-17702).

Unstable development version 2.0dev

Total of 294 commits found their way into the future version branch last week. Several various subsystems and major patches were included – for example the new My home page, Moodle Hubs support and many others. Petr Å koda’s recent patch, that reimplements the whole enrolment subsystem and changes some of the key concepts of roles and their assignments, is still being reviewed in a separate branch. Martin Dougiamas is going to announce the release of Moodle 2.0 – Preview 1 version, just working on the release notes yet.

Quotes of the week

“Users will remember for almost forever a bad/broken release; but will quickly forget that a stable/fine/working release was a year late.”
– Greg Mushial summarizes his experience from 40+ years involved in software development

“Beta version software is likely to be useful for internal demonstrations and previews to select customers. Some developers refer to this stage as a preview, a prototype, a technical preview (TP) or as an early access.”
– Wikipedia, Software release life cycle

Help tooltips in Moodle 2.0

Among many other (and definitely more significant and more important) improvements in Moodle 2.0, there is a new way how the help tooltips are handled. From the users’ point of view, help is still available via those question mark icons. Instead of opening a pop-up window in the browser, Moodle 2.0 uses YUI3 overlay to display a “bubble” with the help text. The behaviour of the tooltip had been a subject of a discussion (MDL-22067) and at the end, it was decided to follow the functionality found in Mahara or Github.

From the developer’s point of view, help texts are not stored in separate files any more. In the dark past, help files used to play a role of inline help, documentation, manuals or even tutorials on using Moodle. Nowadays, with Moodle Documentation portal being actively growing thanks the community contributions, we are trying to revert helps to what they are supposed to be – useful hints on various user interface elements, their meaning and usage. Therefore, the help files are being migrated into proper Moodle strings in 2.0.

For every help, two strings must be defined. One for the label of the thing the help is describing. In the forms, this is the label of the input element in almost all cases. The second string is the help text itself. The identifier of the second string must be the same as the identifier of the first one, just with “_help” suffix, for example:

$string['subject'] = 'Subject';
$string['subject_help'] = 'Message subject will be used as a title at the message view page.';

Let us say we want to add such help in a Moodle form, for ‘msgsubject’ input field. You would probably have a code like:

$mform->addElement('text', 'msgsubject', get_string('subject', 'mymodule'));
$mform->addHelpButton('msgsubject', 'subject', 'mymodule');

That would use the string ‘subject’ defined in your ‘mymodule’ language file as a title of the help and the string ‘subject_help’ defined in the same file as the help text. To get the same result in Moodle 1.9, you would have the help defined in a HTML file, let us say help/messagesubject.html a the code in the form would look like:

$mform->setHelpButton('msgsubject', array('messagesubject', get_string('subject', 'mymodule'), 'mymodule');

To display a standalone help icon anywhere at your page, use help_icon() method of the core renderer instance:

echo $OUTPUT->help_icon('subject', 'mymodule');

Help strings can use Markdown syntax for basic HTML formatting. We use that just for producing bullet list from the lines starting with asterisk.

To give the translators something to start with instead of rewriting all help strings from scratch, we are copying the contents of the translated help files into new help strings wherever it is possible.

Post scriptum

I can’t think of anything to write here today