Kassblog

Here are notes for those who want to make the city, country, and description profile fields not required in Moodle 1.8. The procedure has changed somewhat from version 1.6, which was my previous Moodle. This is helpful when running Moodle on a school intranet, where people usually know each other and these profile fields are not so important. In addition, once there are no longer any required Moodle fields, new users go straight to the Moodle home page instead of to the login screen, which makes the site more usable. We authenticate against Active Directory, so the first name, last name, and email fields are prefilled via LDAP and not editable.

Comment out lines 160 and 166 of user/editlib.php:

160: //$mform->addRule('city', $strrequired, 'required', null, 'client');
166: //$mform->addRule('country', $strrequired, 'required', null, 'client');

Comment out line 26 of user/edit_form.php:

26: //$mform->addRule('description', $strrequired, 'required', null, 'client');

That should do it! Please comment below if you find issues with these steps.

I had one (actually, two) of those open-source compatibility days that OSS critics love to cite. Lesson learned: reduce version dependency as much as possible. We were happily plodding along with Moodle 1.6.3 with Gallery 2.1 integrated within, when I decided to try MoodleSpeex for the first time. I have wanted to provide our language teachers with in-browser audio recording for some time now. However, this worthy goal took me down a crazy path.

I installed Speex into Moodle 1.6.3, and it almost nearly worked. I could record from the browser and upload into the files area, but not a forum. The operation would appear to complete successful, but the new file would not show up. I read in the Moodle forums that someone got it working with Moodle 1.7, so I decided to upgrade — all the way to Moodle 1.8. The forum posts suggested that the problem was with Moodle 1.6, which I now realize is not necessarily true.

I had meant to untar Moodle 1.8 into a test directory but accidentally upgraded my live install! Oops. Moodle worked fine (for the most part), but this broke the custom scripts that I have authenticate against Moodle and the Gallery integration plug-in. However, we did get the latest Moodle features, especially the roles feature that will allow us to provide parents and other guests with Moodle course access without enrolling them as students! This was worth the upgrade in itself and perhaps even the trouble I went through.

Fixing our moodlecheck.pm script to play with the new Moodle installation was pretty straightforward. A couple of table name changes did the trick. One strange change was that location headers stopped working when passing the user from a custom script to the Moodle login page. I had to fall back to redirect headers instead. I would like to take another look at that issue soon, as location headers are cleaner.

It took a bit longer to fix Gallery integration. I found out that development of the Gallery plug-in for Moodle is no longer being developed. That’s an open-source nightmare for a very fine plug-in. I figured that I would just bind Gallery directly to LDAP, so that our users would be able to log into Gallery. Much to my surprise, Gallery does not have a LDAP plug-in! Believe it or not, the only way to provide LDAP authentication to Gallery is to enclose it within another application like Moodle … or in this case, Drupal!

Having played a lot with Drupal recently, it seemed natural to try Gallery integration within Drupal. I find Drupal fragile, however. LDAP authentication and Gallery integration seemed to both work fine, but then I had a resolve a strange problem. Once LDAP authentication was enabled, local Drupal users were no longer able to log in! Within ldapauth.module, I found some constants that appear to be in some state of development. Despite the ominous warning, I switched LDAP_FIRST_DRUPAL on, and then my local users were also able to log in. I would love to know what is going on with that module’s project.

// Private constants. Do not touch
define('LDAP_FIRST_DRUPAL', 1);
//define('LDAP_OR_DRUPAL',1);
define('LDAP_FIRST_LDAP', 0);

Back to MoodleSpeex. It still doesn’t work in Moodle 1.8, though further reading suggests that I should have known that to begin with. I was able to hack enough code to get the Speex recorder to display, but then I just had the same problem as with Moodle 1.6 — could record to files, record within a forum, but not save the recorded file within a forum post. I hope that the Speex developer is interested in updating the plugin for Moodle 1.8!

Interesting tidbit. A project team is right on the Moodle 1.8 update, preparing to update their Moodle-Drupal sign-on integration for the new Moodle. Drupal has such a large community of interested developers that their modules seem to keep up faster with change.

A word of hope: I really want (and still don’t have) a way for students to record audio directly into a browser window within Moodle. My fallback is to teach students to record in Audacity, export to MP3, and save a file, but recording directly into Moodle would be way better. Given the popularity of Flash video recorders and players, could we not get a few schools together to sponsor the development of a Moodle Flash-based audio recorder/player? I really don’t know how hard it would be. Your thoughts?

I am enthused to install proper knowledgebase software on our intranet. Just in the last week, I have noticed a handful of occasions when having documentation available on an issue would have made an enormous difference. Both we and our users spend a lot of time digging up or trying to remember solutions to particular problems. We have a folder of Word docs on our network, but this is not easy to search, maintain, or send to users, so we don’t use it as often as we should. Other departments besides tech have a lot of interest in this as well. Wouldn’t it be great if facilities, the registrar, and the tech department could all post answers to frequently asked questions in a knowledgebase?

I could meet these objectives with a wide-open wiki or Drupal custom content type, but proper knowledgebase software offers several advantages. It works out of the box. I don’t have the time to configure a custom script or Drupal site for a standard business community tool. It requires little maintenance. I love wikis, but it would take a lot of work to repeatedly shift content around in a wiki as categories grew, and the site required greater organization. Comments, ratings, and “popular” features would be built-in.

At the same time, I am having difficulty finding just the right tool. My project requirements are:
- Must have LDAP authentication (and autocreate accounts for LDAP users)
- Must have access control so that some content may be private to some groups

Desirable features include:
- Free
- Open-source
- Personal bookmarking
- Email to a friend

So far, I have tried three packages.

Owl appears to be a popular choice, but I find the user interface to be wildly unusable, especially at the average user level. I want a tool that everyone may easily search, comment, and make contributions to. Owl supports LDAP but does not auto-create users, which would be a hassle for us — either to modify code to auto-create or import lists periodically.

KnowledgePublisher seems like a nice compromise between high function and simple form, but it doesn’t support LDAP authentication as far as I can tell.

KnowledgeTree is the free version of a for-profit product. It has a lovely interface and lots of features, but I am always nervous about a for-profit company pulling development on the free version of a commercial product sometime in the future. Worse, LDAP authentication an error: Cannot use object of type Net_LDAP_Error as array. This would probably be my product of choice if I could get it to work.

Let me know if you have other software recommendations or stories to tell about your knowledgebase experiences!

Update: April 7, 2007

I am going to try phpMyFaq next — it seems extremely well-regarded and fully meets my criteria. There seems to exist a small difference between FAQ and Knowledgebase software. KBs appear to be broader in scope and can serve as a general document repository, whereas FAQs are somewhat more narrowly limited to support-related information — answering questions that people have. While I am often surprised with the secondary uses to which people put existing software, it seems that all of the initial support for this software is support related. At this time, people are happy posting their documents within Moodle, our public web site, or to their private file systems.

A couple of seventh grade students have quite unintentionally earned “top flipbook” on Flip.com with a piece of work on medieval fashion for class! Check it out.

The landscape for multimedia tools seems to be widening of late. Keynote, Comic Life, and Flip.com are examples of the increasing number of options that teachers and students have to create media-rich projects. This is good news, as we are always looking for the most direct path to multimedia authorship. Bells and whistles consistently get in the way of student focus on content.