David Mudrak's blog

Latest stable version 1.9.8+

There are 4 commits into the stable branch from the last development week. Sam Marshall fixed an accessibility issue, preventing IE users from navigating the page with keyboard (MDL-22518). Martin Dougiamas fixed the cases when getremoteaddr() returned NULL because the script was executed via CLI. The empty value violated the non-null constraint on lastip in user table and some scipts (for example LDAP authentication plugin) could not create new user accounts (MDL-19628). Petr Škoda committed Ye Chen’s patch that fixes critical bug in get_users_by_capability(). The symptoms of the bug include “No users were found with permissions to submit this assignment” in case of an assignment in group mode. HTML purifier has been upgraded to the version 4.1 and is available as an experimental feature for PHP5 servers.

Future version Moodle 2.0 Preview 2

There are 281 commits into the future release branch from the last week. Among many other improvements, the function get_string() now uses on disk cache to store the result of merging of standard language pack with the local customization and parent languages. Included YUI libraries have been upgraded to 3.1.1 and 2.8.1. The rotation of the vertical text (also known as the book spin) can be configured via string “thisdirectionvertical” in langconfig.php.

Quotes of the week

“Tracker going down for restart, java needs it monthly kick in the ass”
– Jordan Tomkinson knows how to keep our servers up and running

“Going to commit patch which removes dirroot from config.php, yay!”
– Petr Škoda is always happy when he is cleaning up Moodle source code

New Moodle development books

I like IT books and have dozen or two of them on the shelf in the office. I usually do not read most of them, though. Especially those just copying online documentation and manual pages. It is quite interesting trend that computer books have usually hundreds of pages while the real added valuable information could be compressed to five of ten pages of text. But the shelf full of thick computer books gives an impression that the guy really knows what he is talking about when asking you to turn it off and on again
Given that, I appreciate books that offer more than you can find online in API documentation. And I guess the new book on Moodle 1.9 development by Mike Churchward and Jonathan Moore from Remote Learner (U.S. and Canada Moodle Partner) can be the case. It was released by Packt Publishing together with yet another one by Paul James Gadsdon, dealing with Moodle custom themes development.
I have ordered both of them and am looking forward to see how they are written. According the sample chapters available, they look as promising guides and tutorials on the subject. Shall be noted that by buying Moodle books, you help support Moodle development as a percentage of all sales goes to the Moodle Trust.