Some Random Thoughts

This is part of a blog series of short profiles on plugin developers within the Moodle community. Today it is Sam Marshall

Tell us something about yourself

My current desktop background is from the Japanese light novel/anime/etc series Maria-sama ga miteru (The Virgin Mary is watching). The picture is a silhouette of Yumi and Sachiko holding hands in front of some abstract leaves-and-cherry-blossom swirlies drawn by the wallpaper artist.

Huh, that isn’t what you meant?

I work for the Open University as one of the lead technical developers on our Moodle-based VLE, which is used to run the websites for all the study modules that the university offers.

When did you first start programming?

First? Really?

First programming that was more than ’10 print hello, 20 goto 10′ was probably on the CASIO PB-80 pocket computer, in BASIC, when I was about six. I remember coding a Hangman game.

The system had a massive 544 bytes of memory so the way it worked was, you would code the game and have maybe 150 bytes left to put 10 or so words into the data memory. Then you would pass it to your sibling to play the game for a bit, and when he ran out of words he could edit the data and add his and pass it back.

Hours of fun and obviously far more efficient than just using a piece of paper.

When did you first encounter Moodle?

When it was suggested to replace our previous in-house system. I don’t remember exactly when, but it was version 1.6.

What did you use Moodle for?

As a developer and for troubleshooting / advising admins. Apart from that I just use it for my blog, some internal forums, and moodle.org forums.

What was your first Moodle plugin? Why did you write it?

Probably it might have been the original ‘resourcepage’ module (which is now being superceded by the subpage module for Moodle 2).

When we started using Moodle and switched from our previous system, Moodle couldn’t handle pages with lists of files on, which was basically the only feature of the previous system. So in order to transition we had to implement that in Moodle.

Amusingly, even in current Moodle 2.2 six versions later, Moodle *still* can’t nicely handle pages with lists of files on without custom modules.

What is your latest Moodle plugin & why did you write it?

Literally, not sure – I write a lot. Our internal system has about 150 plugins (obviously I didn’t write all of those). Most of them are small and simple and don’t do much.

Of the ones which are publicly available, I guess subpage is latest. (And by the way, I didn’t actually originally write that one – I did a detailed design, and code reviewed the result, but it was coded by a developer at Catalyst. We’re maintaining it in-house though so I guess it is gradually getting more and more ‘mine’ or at least ours.)

Subpage I mentioned above; it’s an only slightly hacky way to let you put activities and resources onto ‘subpages’ off the main course page. It’s basically essential to the way our study module websites are developed, so I had to do it (or something like it) before we could migrate to Moodle 2.

There are a bunch of other modules that ought to be publicly available but aren’t because we haven’t had time.

What would you say to someone who is considering writing a Moodle plugin?

When you’re coding in Moodle, a lot of the time you need to go find an example from core code to basically copy.

Try to learn which modules are the ‘good’ ones you should copy and which are the old, encrusted ones that you should be cautious about copying from.

Also, try to follow the Moodle code style guidelines and put appropriate comments on everything; it’ll make your code easier to read/review for other developers and anyone considering using it.

Final Thoughts

Too busy for thinking right now.

Some Plugins

This is a list of the plugins that Sam has contributed to that are currently (Feb 2012) in the Moodle plugins database. To view all these in the Moodle.org Plugin database check this page

This is part of a blog series of short profiles on plugin developers within the Moodle community. Today it is John Stabinger.

Tell us something about yourself

My day job is with a suburban school district in Pennsylvania. I also design/code for Newschool Learning, a Moodle Partner. I have B.A.s in English and Journalism, and an M.Ed. in secondary education.

When did you first start programming?

I don’t really consider myself a programmer. A designer/coder would be a better title for what I do. I started developing websites 10 years ago, but only really started working on Moodle design 3 years ago.

I mainly use CSS and javascript with minor doses of PHP (when necessary).

When did you first encounter Moodle?

I first encountered Moodle about 3-4 years ago at work.

What did you use Moodle for?

I use Moodle from all three standpoints, as a teacher, admin and as a developer.

What was your first Moodle plugin? Why did you write it?

I created a very poor theme based on Mocha UI. I was interested in Moodle and was using the UI for another project so I attempted to mash them together. The results were not very pretty.

What is your latest Moodle plugin & why did you write it?

My latest plugin is the theme Fabric. I wrote it to showcase some CSS3 transitions I have been working on (see block open/close).

What would you say to someone who is considering writing a Moodle plugin?

Grab a plugin that is close to what you want, and take it apart. Don’t worry about perfection…

Some Plugins

This is a list of the plugins that John has contributed to that are currently (Jan 2012) in the Moodle plugins database. To view all these in the Moodle.org Plugin database check this page

This is part of a blog series of short profiles on plugin developers within the Moodle community. Today it is Dan Marsden.

Tell us something about yourself

My wife and I have 5 great kids; Justin, Britney, Tori, Larissa and Malea, and my work hours fit around school pick-ups/drop-offs.

I maintain the Choice and SCORM Modules in Moodle, Developer of the Plagiarism API in 2.0. I have worked extensively on a range of other areas in Moodle including various 3rd party plugins.

I now work as the “Christchurch office” of Catalyst (a Moodle Partner) from a home office which allows my time to flex around the needs of a large family!

When did you first start programming?

I started with quickbasic as a 14yr old hacking on various programs including one that replicated the school login screen (dos based) (which I didn’t use for malicious purposes – honest!)

My first paid gig was a bit later developing an ASP based website connected to some data from a filemaker db.

When did you first encounter Moodle?

My first introduction to Moodle was in a position at Lincoln University after being hired as the “educational developer” to look after their in-house LMS based around Microsoft FrontPage and a back-end Microsoft Access Database….. I quickly spent time looking for ‘something better’ and started playing with Moodle 1.3/1.4 – I then got on board with a Government funded project that collaborated with a range of higher ed institutions in NZ looking at the range of open source LMS that were available at the time and recommend one to be adopted by the institutions involved in the project. (Moodle was selected)

My first bits of Moodle development were to add the “limit” function to the choice module (the Lincoln LMS had a lab booking app written in perl that needed to be replaced by functionality in Moodle) I then created the ntlm auth plugin (which has since been merged into the standard ldap auth plugin in core) to allow SSO.

What did you use Moodle for?

In my first job it was both Moodle admin and dev, but now it is 100% as developer.

What was your first Moodle plugin? Why did you write it?

My first “plugin” was the NTLM Auth plugin – when I first started at Lincoln the in-house LMS used a separate username/password to access each course which was given to students at the start of the year and they would have 6 or 7 different passwords to access the different courses so they were always forgetting them, having difficulty accessing the courses, so before we moved to Moodle I implemented NTLM Auth across all course sites allowing them to use their “main” user login to access their courses – at this time we also implemented a process to pull user enrolments out of the SMS (PeopleSoft) and store them as groups in Active Directory so we could set group level permissions on the server. When we moved to Moodle we wanted to keep the SSO that NTLM provided for on-campus users.

What is your latest Moodle plugin & why did you write it?

My latest plugin is a generic courseformat called “singlemod” based on the SCORM course format that allows other modules to be loaded as soon as someone enters a course.

The SCORM course format allows a single SCORM to be loaded as the only item in the Moodle course – I saw a request from a user asking for another module to be loaded in a similar way so I wondered how quick it would be to develop a course format that would support something similar.

I’d be interested in replacing the SCORM course format in Moodle with this new code – it needs a little bit of work before this can be done and the only module that currently supports it is the SCORM mod.

What would you say to someone who is considering writing a Moodle plugin?

Find a recently developed core plugin to base your code on – DON’T look at SCORM!!!.

Final Thoughts

Google, Google, Google.

The community forums are a massive knowledge base – use Google to search through moodle.org for keywords of a problem you have – then if you still can’t find anything, don’t be afraid to ask questions in the forums – try to find the most appropriate forum first – don’t cross-post the same question in multiple forums – then wait patiently for a response!

Some Plugins

This is a list of the plugins that Dan has contributed to that are currently (Jan 2012) in the Moodle plugins database. To view all these in the Moodle.org Plugin database check this page

This is part of a blog series of short profiles on plugin developers within the Moodle community. Today it is Jenny Gray.

Tell us something about yourself

I am a leading technical developer for the Open University, UK.  I’ve been working mostly on OpenLearn http://openlearn.open.ac.uk over the past 5 years, and recently transferred some of our plug-ins to Moodle 2 and built a separate web annotation system.

When did you first start programming?

I started programming in 1990 in Fortran.  I worked for the Bank of England and was responsible for maintaining and extending their macro model of the UK economy under the guidance of a team of economists.  I had no programming training at that time and was totally self-taught.  The Bank kindly paid for me to get an undergrad degree (from the OU!!) in computing. Over time I moved into their web team and was responsible for creating their first Intranet site.

When did you first encounter Moodle?

In 2005 when I was told to use it as a platform to set up our Open CourseWare initiative, OpenLearn.

What did you use Moodle for?

I’m admin for OpenLearn (and a couple of other smaller special projects sites which are less public), and developer for all those platforms and occasionally for our student-facing servers.

What was your first Moodle plugin? Why did you write it?

Too long ago to remember!  Probably the “download this unit” block, which just prints links to everything in a folder called “downloads” where we put the alternative format versions of OpenLearn units.

I get asked for this block a lot, because people think it’s doing the conversion as well.  Sadly it isn’t!

What is your latest Moodle plugin & why did you write it?

My latest plugin is A recommender block.

Admins customise which recommendation services they want displayed (so our OpenLearn and Student platforms can have different ones through the same block), and the block queries the database and offers links to things that might be useful.

For example there’s an “other open educational resources like this” service, a “people on this course looked at this activity recently” service…  Services can be added without rewriting the entire block.

What would you say to someone who is considering writing a Moodle plugin?

Start simple, read the documentation, use the forums for help, think about adapting something that already exists.

The important thing is to know what your users want – who is the plugin for, how can you make things easy for them.  If you get this right, probably with paper prototypes first, you’re more likely to be successful.

Final Thoughts

I’m a pragmatic programmer with a strong customer focus.  It doesn’t matter to me if the standard is perfect – if it is difficult to implement and/or not useful to your audience then there’s no point in adhering to it.

I also think it is better to release early and get feedback so you can iterate towards the best solution, adding bells & whistles as you go.

So I guess I’m advocating an agile/rapid application development style of programming.

Some Plugins

This is a list of the plugins that Jenny has contributed to that are currently (Jan 2012) in the new Moodle plugins database. To view all these in the Moodle.org Plugin database check this page