January 2009

As many of you may know, journal feedback in Moodle is via a text box and not a WYSIWYG editor.  So when a tutor leaves feedback containing an apostrophe, a stripslash (backslash) is inserted into the text.  This is fine and I understand the (MySQL) reasons why, however… my tutors do not!  Each time a tutor saves new feedback, an extra stripslash is added. After many edits the feedback is littered with stripslashes.

So as a temporary fix I have removed the stripslashes by modifying /mod/journal/report.php.

By replacing the line:

This is a simple idea, but very effective nevertheless.

I have made it even easier to find courses in the MyMoodle course list by placing category icons next to each course name.

Courses in the Sport Category have a small football icon, IT courses have a floppy disc, Tutorial courses have a question mark symbol and so on.

The script works by first checking for a .png file with the name of the category ID.  If it finds the file it will include the icon, if an icon has not yet been created for the category then it will show the default icon.

Using Jplayer 4.5.230 it is possible to include subtitles on Moodle videos.  The subtitles are encoded in an XML file which includes the timings and content.

In order to achieve this in Moodle there are a few core code tweaks to perform including a Jplayer upgrade.

To see Moodle Subtitles (close captions) in action visit the link below:

Today I finished working on the quick course edit bar.  The bar appears once the “Turn editing On” button is selected.  The bar drops down beneath the breadcrumb trail to reveal 3 of the most common settings that our tutors have problems finding under the course settings.

Today I created a Moodle Task List (MTL) which further enhances the custom MyMoodle page.

The Moodle Task List works by checking a series of database queries to see whether or not a student (or staff member) has completed a certain activity or visited a certain page.

The queries are modular and extra queries can easily be “bolted” on to the list.

This task list will work great for our inductions at the start of the new term.  The list will prompt the student to do the following:

Every Moodle administrator/developer has daily tasks that they perform.

Although many jobs can be automated during the cron there are often small jobs to do that can accumitively take up a lot of time.
I needed a to-do list system that would collate all my daily Moodle tasks and display them on one page.

Following on from my iPhone detection script I have added the Windows CE User Agent.  When Moodle detects the WinCE browser tag it loads a new stylesheet called wince.css.

We have finished our version of Moodle for the iPhone.  It is not an iPhone app but we have made it look like one.

The script uses a PHP script to determine the User Agent.  If the User Agent equals “iPhone” then we tell Moodle to load the iPhone stylesheet.

I have created a new skin for the MP3 player in Moodle.  It looks much better than the default one.  When I get more time I will create some more and make them available for download.