25 January 2011, 6:05

Hi everyone. First post here, so apologies if I'm in the wrong place.

I'm at the University of Kent in the UK, and we're piloting Mahara with a view to making it available to all staff and students (circa 20,000 people in total) in September. As part of the pilot I'm developing new themes and coming up with ideas about new plugins for our developers to implement. I've had a bit of a tinker myself and I'd like some advice.

I've reverse-engineered the textbox blocktype to create a simple block to make it easy as possible to add embed codes to views. It's simple but useful as it reduces the number of clicks required to do this. This simply meant duplicating the textbox blocktype and changing the wysiwyg field to a text field. Obviously I've also had to change the language files and a few other things.

I'd like to contribute this back to the community (something I've never done before) but I'd like to know:

1. How to submit my plugin.
2. How to attribute the copyright of the plugin - All I've done is tweak existing code so it doesn't seem right to remove the authorship of the main developers and the copyright of Catalyst, and substitute with myself and my institution respectively. 

The second question might seem trivial to some but it's important to me that I don't offend anyone or fall foul of copyright law. I've tried to wade throught the various sites explaining the GPL licence but I can't find what I'm looking for.

Any advice on this would be greatly appreciated. Steve

25 January 2011, 16:49

Hello Steve,

That is great that you are going to contribute to Mahara and join the growing community of Mahara developers.

Mahara uses GIT for version control, so the easiest way to submit the code is to create your own branch of Mahara on Gitorius, commit your changes on top of it and then submit a merge request to Mahara project. Alternatively, you may submit your work as a set of patches. The work will be reviewed by core developers, and they will decide whether it should be included to the core. You might be asked to change or improve something during revision.

Regarding the copyright, if you create a new file that did not exist before, feel free changing the author and copyright fields to yours (see htdocs/group/changegroupsmembership.json.php for example of different from Catalyst copyright), though if it is largely based on someone's other work, you may specify both authors (e.g. htdocs/lib/ddl.php). Telling the true I am not familiar with licensing details either, perhaps someone else can tell you more. We definitely should consider adding licensing stuff to wiki.

01 February 2011, 4:53

Thanks Ruslan,

Would another option be to host the plugin in a view on mahara.org and add it to the plugins wiki page, like Gregor Anželjhas with his blocktype plugins? This seems to be the easiest option.

01 February 2011, 8:44

It is absolutely up to you. If you find this easier, publish it in the view like Gregor does. You can move it to git repositary whenever you like in the future.

26 January 2011, 11:36

This sounds great Steve, would love to see the block plugin appear for download somewhere...

Thanks,

Tom

31 January 2011, 23:09

Hi Steve,

Have you got an account on gitorious.org already? If so, we can create a new project for you on here:

  http://gitorious.org/mahara-contrib

In terms of copyright stuff, you don't need to attribute copyright to us, just add your name to the list. For example, if the existing statement says:

  Copyright 2010 Catalyst IT Ltd

You can add yourself this way:

  Copyright 2010 Catalyst IT Ltd
            2011 Steve Bailey <[email protected]>

Cheers,

Francois

01 February 2011, 4:45

Thanks everyone. I don't have an account on Gitorious but I'll look into it and report back. I've got a few changes to make before it's ready to share, and I'm also working on some themes I'd like to open-source, so it might take me a little while to get it all sorted.

Thanks again. Steve

23 February 2011, 3:54

Hi Steve,

I'm in a very similar position to you in terms of piloting Mahara for a bigger rollout later on. (University of the Arts London, ~25,000 students.) Maybe we should compare notes.

I've also been developing some simple plugins which I could share.

I think it would be great in the longer term if we could establish a directory of plugins as with a resource like Wordpress. I know that some of the stuff I'm working on might be useful to some people, but not everyone. That does introduce the issue of quality control though.

23 February 2011, 16:08

As a first step, you could put your code somewhere (ideally in a public source control system) and then add a link to it from the wiki:

  http://wiki.mahara.org/Plugins

Cheers,

Francois

18 June 2011, 1:14

Hi Steve, I was just wondering if your plugin ever got posted? I don't see it on the wiki.

I'm not to the point of developing plugins myself, but have been trying (and failing)  to embed general things not covered by embedly, the googleapps plugin, etc. Like a simple Diigo link roll.

It sounds like your plugin might do the trick.

Thanks,

Malcolm