Got ForumNG going with Moodle 2.3.

[NigelCunningham]

Hi.

My patch gets ForumNG going with Moodle 2.3. I haven't checked every feature - just the most important ones (posting and replying).

Signed-off-by: Nigel Cunningham distance@mst.edu.au

[timhunt]

I just wanted to let you know that sam (ForumNG master) is on leave for the next two weeks, so don't expect an immediate response. However, thanks for working on this.

In the mean time, you might like to post about this at http://moodle.org/mod/forum/view.php?id=44, so other people know this patch exists, and if they were brave enough to test it, we would like to know if it works.

[NigelCunningham]

Hi.

On 07/23/2012 07:06 PM, Tim Hunt wrote:

I just wanted to let you know that sam (ForumNG master) is on leave for the next two weeks, so don't expect an immediate response. However, thanks for working on this.

In the mean time, you might like to post about this at http://moodle.org/mod/forum/view.php?id=44, so other people know this patch exists, and if they were brave enough to test it, we would like to know if it works.

Thanks! I'm using it on a live site for the parts I mentioned.

Regards,

Nigel

[sammarshallou]

Thanks for this contribution. Unfortunately we are not going to be able to include it in the ForumNG code yet because it is not compatible with Moodle 2.2 (I just tried); our 'master' branch is currently for 2.2. Looking at the code, I suspect there may be a few other issues with it, as it seems to have removed some hacks which I think were necessary to make everything work nicely.

In general, not referring to the patch, I don't like the way this area of code with the hidden forms is implemented in ForumNG (yes it was my code) - it was OK for Moodle 1.9 but in 2.x with file managers and all that business, it is really too complicated. I would like to rewrite this so that instead of including the forms on the page, it uses iframes. This may make the UI slightly slower in some cases (although I'm not sure that is true any more because the new filesystem is a bit less efficient than the 1.9 solution I used to have, so I think I had to add in server requests anyway) but I'm sure it should be possible to do in a less hacky way.

Hopefully this patch will be useful to other people who need a fix in the meantime, as I'm sure it basically works.

[NigelCunningham]

Hi Sam.

On 08/08/2012 10:16 PM, sam marshall wrote:

Thanks for this contribution. Unfortunately we are not going to be able to include it in the ForumNG code yet because it is not compatible with Moodle 2.2 (I just tried); our 'master' branch is currently for 2.2. Looking at the code, I suspect there may be a few other issues with it, as it seems to have removed some hacks which I think were necessary to make everything work nicely.

In general, not referring to the patch, I don't like the way this area of code with the hidden forms is implemented in ForumNG (yes it was my code) - it was OK for Moodle 1.9 but in 2.x with file managers and all that business, it is really too complicated. I would like to rewrite this so that instead of including the forms on the page, it uses iframes. This may make the UI slightly slower in some cases (although I'm not sure that is true any more because the new filesystem is a bit less efficient than the 1.9 solution I used to have, so I think I had to add in server requests anyway) but I'm sure it should be possible to do in a less hacky way.

Hopefully this patch will be useful to other people who need a fix in the meantime, as I'm sure it basically works.

Thanks for your reply.

I'm using this version of the code on a live site, and it seems to work nicely - when you say "it seems to have removed some hacks which I think were necessary to make everything work nicely", what were you thinking? (With this version, I get the HTML editor and the file attachment dialog. I haven't tested adding attachments, but the text area certainly works).

I completely agree with you regarding the general approach - it does feel 'unclean', but I'm still getting to grips with the innards of Moodle and was under a time constraint that stopped me from doing anything further.

I'm also planning on further patches. I want to implement support for per-user moderation of messages (ie moderate some students and not others) and a 'render all posts in a single thread' mode like forum has.

Regards,

Nigel

[sammarshallou]

Nigel: I wasn't intending this as a criticism of your patch, just as explanation of why I'm not including it :)

The hacks I thought were necessary related to adding file attachments and images (in both reply and edit) and applying the size limits on same. So those are the bits I would look at if you want to test to see if it is fully working.

Per-user moderation of messages is interesting, although sounds like it could add a bit of complexity. I hope you can do that using a capability of the user. (To avoid negative capabilities, I guess something like mod/forumng:escapemoderation which is given to authenticated user by default, then you could remove it from people.)

Single-discussion view, if that is a forum type like it is in standard forum, basically just works by having the forum create its own single discussion and just use that... You should be able to make that as a forum type in forumng too (hm, we didn't do it already? Should be pretty easy I think).

If you would like either change to go into standard ForumNG - and it sounds like both could be useful - it would be a good idea if we discussed it first (are you on the moodle hq jabber chat?) and/or you could do a design document and i'll review it etc, before coding. Of course you're welcome to submit patches anyway, just agreeing on the design would make it more likely they get included.

[NigelCunningham]

Hi Sam.

On 08/13/2012 07:37 PM, sam marshall wrote:

Nigel: I wasn't intending this as a criticism of your patch, just as explanation of why I'm not including it :)

Yeah, I understood that - sorry if I wasn't clear.

The hacks I thought were necessary related to adding file attachments and images (in both reply and edit) and applying the size limits on same. So those are the bits I would look at if you want to test to see if it is fully working.

Okay; I'll try to find time to do that.

Per-user moderation of messages is interesting, although sounds like it could add a bit of complexity. I hope you can do that using a capability of the user. (To avoid negative capabilities, I guess something like mod/forumng:escapemoderation which is given to authenticated user by default, then you could remove it from people.)

Yeah; makes sense to me. In the meantime though, we simply removed all posting rights for the person who was causing issues so this one might not happen.

Single-discussion view, if that is a forum type like it is in standard forum, basically just works by having the forum create its own single discussion and just use that... You should be able to make that as a forum type in forumng too (hm, we didn't do it already? Should be pretty easy I think).

Mmm. We still want the general idea of people having to create one reply to the original question (which is in the Intro for the forum) and then a couple of replies to other responses. We just want people to be able to see the whole discussion at once.

If you would like either change to go into standard ForumNG - and it sounds like both could be useful - it would be a good idea if we discussed it first (are you on the moodle hq jabber chat?) and/or you could do a design document and i'll review it etc, before coding. Of course you're welcome to submit patches anyway, just agreeing on the design would make it more likely they get included.

Right. I'm not on the Moodle Jabber thingy. I'll see if I can set that up in the morning when I go in to work.

Regards,

Nigel