David Mudrak's blog

Latest stable version 1.9.8+

There are 4 commits into the stable branch from the last development week. Dan Marsden fixed a bug in SCORM backup/restore (MDL-22301) and yet another one which was caused by not using absolute file paths when including a PHP file (MDL-22340). In Moodle, the best way to include other files (typically libraries or forms definitions) is to include the main config.php via dirname(__FILE__) and then include all other files needed via their full path, using $CFG->dirroot or $CFG->libdir.
Eloy Lafuente updated the timezones database shipped with Moodle to version tzdata2010i (MDL-18576). This database contains information about the world’s time zones and daylight saving time and helps our in-built calendar to calculate correct dates and times for users from all around the world. Moodle uses so called Olson database, a public-domain collaborative compilation of timezones data, currently maintained by Paul Eggert.
Pierre Pichet committed a patch fixing buggy behaviour of calculated question type on duplicate (save as new question).

Future version Moodle 2.0 Preview 1

There are 158 commits into the future release branch from the last week. On Thursday, Martin Dougiamas announced the release of Moodle 2.0 Preview 1 version, the first milestone on about 10 weeks long track to reach final Moodle 2.0. See the preview release notes for more information.

Quotes of the week

“It is a good idea, so I put it in the tracker. The point of the tracker is that it remembers things, so we can forget about them.”
– Tim Hunt on tracker.moodle.org

“I’m really looking forward to 2.1 and working on modules again.”
– Martin Dougiamas knows that many of improvements in 2.0 lie in the dark deep of Moodle architecture internals and are never to be actually seen by users

Installing Moodle from the command line

I love Linux for many reasons and not only because it is free as in being free after drinking beer. Since the first days with Linux, I’ve been impressed by the power of command line utilities, following the Unix philosophy of doing just one thing, doing it well and cooperating with other small programs. From version 2.0, Moodle supports installation and upgrades from the command line. Of course I was happy I could spend some time on improving these routines a bit.
CLI programs for common administration tasks (installation, upgrade, switching the maintenance mode and resetting a forgotten user password are supported at the moment) can be found in admin/cli/ directory of standard Moodle 2.0 source code. You should run them as the same user as is used for the webserver process (apache or wwwrun are used usually).
This is an example of how I installed a fresh Moodle 2.0 at my notebook today:

$ php admin/cli/install.php --lang=en
--wwwroot=http://localhost/moodle20
--dataroot=/var/www/moodledata/moodle20
--dbname=moodle20 --dbuser=apache
--dbpass=xxxxxx --dbsocket

In this example, the script runs in an interactive mode, asking for all needed data and using the provided ones as default. There is also a possibility to execute the script in non-interactive mode, providing all required information as CLI parameters. Such an option may be interesting for hosting providers as it allows to automate the process of creating a new Moodle site.

Post scriptum

http://www.projectcartoon.com/cartoon/1