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For some strange reason, when a user clicks on a PowerPoint from within Moodle that is set to "New Window" they are prompted with the Open, Save, Cancel Box.  But when they click open, PowerPoint is launched and the presentation displays an empty white screen.

I think it has something to do with the TEMP folder and the way IE references this folder.  This bug only seems to happen on campus and works fine with Firefox, Chrome etc…

As a quick fix I edited file.php in the Moodle root directory.

And changed the line:

I often receive questions from Moodlers about how to tackle a Moodle overhaul so I thought I’d share my thoughts on this with the Moodle community.

Moodle to me is a constantly evolving project, I often change things as I’m going along.  Many people set out to create a finished product and as a result set their expectations too high and put too much pressure on themselves to finish the project in the allotted time.

This hack is awesome! At last, the WYSIWYG editor works for Mac Users and Google Chrome.

I can’t take any credit for this as it’s something I found on moodle.org.

Pall Thayer released the code so a big thank you to him.

The origial post can be found here but I have documented the process here and simplified the instructions below as they were a bit tricky to follow:

First we need to edit the file lib/moodlelib.lib

Unless you are sat in front of your Moodle installation 24 hours a day, how will you know if the site goes down?  Wouldn’t it be nice to receive an email or a text if Moodle stops responding?  I happened to stumble upon the website below:

This tool is still very much in beta but I thought I’d write about it’s developments.

I often refer to my Online Users page to see who’s on Moodle but this doesn’t tell me where the activity is.  I wanted a tool like TweetDeck that would display all the activity on Moodle and show me where people are so I can guage what goes on at certain times of the day.

Courtesy of Packt Publishing

Recently I was asked by Packt Publishing to read and review the Moodle Administration book by Alex Buchner. So here goes…

There are literally dozens of open source content management systems available to download, plus many commercial ones, not to mention Microsoft Sharepoint, so why would anyone consider using a VLE as an intranet tool.

Well in short, we did.

Moodle has some great interactive tools (activities) and some unique ways of displaying information (resources). And we felt that these tools could be used effectively in an intranet environment.

In order to maintain compatibility standards we use FLV files for all of our videos in Moodle.  This then uses JPlayer to stream the video.  However, JPlayer is a flash tool and therefore videos do not work on the iPhone.

To get around this I have embedded my iPhone detection script into mod/file resource on Moodle.  I then upload an .mp4 version of the same file, in the same folder as the .flv version.

The new code released by Microsoft allows users to log in using their LIVE ID and integrate their calendar events and email in Moodle.  As Martin Dougiamas noted, LIVE uses the same API’s as Exchange Server so integrating into a private college exchange server should be fairly straight forward.