David Mudrak's blog

Latest stable version 1.9.9+

There are 15 commits into the latest stable branch from the last development week (from Tue Sep 14 to Mon 20 Sep) and the current weekly build seems to contain several important fixes. ♦ Andrew Davis fixed two critical bug in the Gradebook. The first one caused that the calculated total course grades in the user report were incorrect when all users were selected. The first student’s grade was displayed instead of the valid values (MDL-22841). The second bug, spotted by Chris Bandy, was that Moodle actually never recorded the id of the user making a change when archiving it in the grades history (MDL-23928). ♦ Iñaki Arenaza fixed a bug in CAS authentication plugin. Now there is no need to have an LDAP server to fetch user data from and you can fetch your CAS users into Moodle from other sources (like a text file), too. Credit goes to Matthew Turney for the patch (MDL-16168). ♦ Martin Dougiamas fixed a problem reported by Stefan Schramm. Forum module put invalid In-Reply-To and References headers in mails for the initial thread posts. That led to broken sorting of emails in mail clients with mail threads support (MDL-22551). ♦ Sam Hemelryk fixed the Assignment module so that it still allows students to view their submission even after they do not have the capability to submit it any more (MDL-23848). ♦ Andrea Bicciolo fixed a small regression of his recent patch in the Database module (MDL-24033). ♦ Pierre Pichet committed Oleg Sychev’s patch that replaces one !empty() call with the correct isset() in the form for editing a question with extra_question_fields so the zero value is accepted now (MDL-24241). ♦ Eloy Lafuente made new Dzongkha language pack available for Moodle installation. ♦ I have applied a patch provided by Hubert Chathi that fixes addGroupRule() in form elements containing square brackets and fixed client side validation for the Location field in the Resource so that the field is required now.

Moodle 2.0 RC1

There are 403 commits into the main development branch from the last week. Most of them are results of general code clean up made by Petr Å koda. Petr used code analysis feature of his currently favourite IDE PhpStorm and discovered many malicious typos, forgotten global variable declarations and other mistakes in Moodle 2.0 code.
Even without an official announcement, many community members noticed that 2.0 development cycle reached the Release Candidate 1 milestone. The development team considers the branch feature-complete. See more details in the Release notes.
Hot gossip, Martin Dougiamas confirmed that Moodle development will definitely switch from CVS to git in a very near future. Even though some doubt about it, I can’t imagine any development work without this tool any more. Yes, I admit that mastering git takes some time but I can just recommend it to all developers and contributors – and especially to those making their own customizations of the code.

Quotes of the week

“In any case, the important point to learn is to never use $PAGE for deciding contexts as far as it causes all the ‘remote’ operations to fail.”
– Eloy Lafuente reminds us that global $PAGE is supposed to be used only for output rendering purposes and that abusing it at lower levels leads to problems.

“Software development is meant to be fun. If it isn’t, the process is wrong.”
– Pete McBreen in his Software Craftsmanship: The New Imperative