28 November 2011, 3:57

Hello Everyone,

It has been a while since my last post, we were very busy around here writing plugins and extra features for mahara.

Although Mahara is the bestest in terms of architecture, it is a complete torture for us to use Pieforms and other features because they are not well documented. we have brought this up to the surface once before and we are bringing it up back again.

One of the most talented and exciting ideas in Mahara is pieforms unfortunately it is under documented. its very horrible when you spend so much hours trying to figure out how things are working on pieforms. its is such a waste of talent.

We all believe in Qayrwan.com that Mahara will bright future like moodle but unfortunately developers have a very hard time expanding the features although you have great libraries that can be utilized but there are no way to you know how to use them or if the functions are already there.

What we suggest as a solution for this problem, is to use php-xref like moodle and comment on some of the most commonly used function like pieforms and dml functions so developers get familiar with and extend mahara.

Thanks everyone and we hope we are not rude with this post. we are just expressing our thoughts

Best,

Mohamamd Abu Musa

28 November 2011, 5:16

Hello Mohammad, yeah what many open source projects are missing is a good developer-oriented documentation. Though, personally I think that pieforms are documented good enough (at least sufficient for experienced developer who did not see them before). There is a page on the wiki and some docuemntation on sourceforge - did you see both of them?

By the way, you are always welcome to click 'edit' button on the wiki page and add what you think is missing .

Best,

Ruslan

29 November 2011, 9:31

Hello Ruslan,

How are you Ruslan? I respectfully disagree with “it's well documented”. We are having a hard time figuring out how to use pieforms they you are using it in Mahara. After full analysis we figured out most parts of how pieforms work but until now. We still having problems with the following functions in terms of using, how to use them, and where to use them.

Please check the following code we used to test pieforms.

https://gist.github.com/94b82e181f5710ee7ba3

As you notice we managed to successfully activate the parts were jsform is set to false. But when it comes to AJAX and JSON we have problems in terms of submitting the form data.

We tried to imitate some other parts of Mahara but it was too complex and time consuming to figure out how they are functioning. Please check out the above code and help us with following questions

1. What is the sequence of events that triggers in pieforms (with and without jsform enabled)?

2. How the call back functions are used and when do think they are best used?

3. What is the purpose of replycallback, we didn't mange to see it in action?

We will be more than happy to share what we figured out with other developers and even write some code samples utilizing pieforms and share them on mahara website.

BWT: we tried to use the documentation links available on mahara, they are a bit old and don't contain everything we were looking for.

Best,

Mohammad

30 November 2011, 2:59

Hello Ruslan again,

Thanks for your comments, we have figured out how exactly the pieforms work. however we still have one function that we did not mange to activate

form_replycallback

Please let us know what is the purpose of this function and how it can be used.

All The Best and thanks again

Mohammad

30 November 2011, 4:14

Hello Mohammad,

You do not really need to specify any of callback functions in the form definition unless you have a good reason to 

'replycallback' for instance is called to handle replying to the form after calling $form->reply(). By default it is set to (in lib/mahara.php, pieform_configure())

'replycallback'  => 'pieform_reply',

pieform_reply() function is defined in lib/mahara.php as well, it adds form reply message to the corresponding session variables (via $SESSION->add_error_msg or $SESSION->add_ok_msg), so that the message will be shown on the screen.

if you need to override it by your own callback function, feel free to define it in any of your form definition specifying your own function that will process reply messages and do what you need.

I hope this will help you to understand pieforms better ))

30 November 2011, 9:08

Hello Ruslan,

Please find the below code which we managed to build to integrate tagify with mahara and pieforms. now it functions fully but we have to do some testing. 

https://gist.github.com/3f8ccc38d9f1feb88928

What we basiclly did is to integrate the following code with mahara, now its working as it suppose to do

http://projects.alicialiu.net/jquery-tagify-demo/

We will publish it on Mahara.org once we are done with the testing and publishing it on http://www.qayrwan.com/

Thanks for your help

28 November 2011, 16:32

Hi Mohammad,

Missing developer documentation is indeed a common complaint we hear. One of the problems is that we're not sure exactly what people need. The existing developers don't refer often to the documentation, so they have a hard time knowing what might be missing for newcomers.

One way you can help is to add your thoughts to the list on this page:

  https://wiki.mahara.org/index.php/Developer_Area/Documentation_Wishlist

By the way, if you'd like to contribute your some of your plugins back to the community, please feel free to add them to this page:

  https://wiki.mahara.org/index.php/Plugins

Cheers,

Francois

29 November 2011, 9:36

Hello Francois,

We will do more than adding to the documentation wish-list, we may produce some video casts on how to create Mahara based code since we have been developing and integrating on mahara for three months now.

I really hope you can start a program in which core developers can share ideas with other developers here in the site, so we can expand and provide plug ins. just like what the people in moodle are doing.

I think Mahara has a great future, so we are investing in it now. please know that we are coordinating with Arab developers to produce plugins and content using mahara but the problem we are facing is understanding the code. On the other hand when we develop plugins and module for moodle its done without huge trouble.

Please suggest what you have in mind to make our life and yours easier and please be sure that we will be the first to join

Best,
Mohammad

29 November 2011, 14:04

Hello Mohammad,

Your plans for your involvement in the Mahara development sound great. I am looking forward to seeing more.

In terms of discussing development work, plugins etc., these conversations happen here in the developer forum. You can get very technical if needed. At the moment, plugins are listed on the wiki page that Francois already mentioned, but if you want to set up a better system, let us know.

Besides the forum discussions, we have a monthly IRC developer meeting yo which you are invited. You can also propose topics for discussion. The next meeting will be next Tuesday, December 6, 2011.

Cheers

Kristina

30 November 2011, 9:18

Hello Kristina,

Thanks for your comments we will be sharing some of our ideas during the weekend for now please check out my latest post.

We will try our best to be in the next developer meeting.

Please checkout the screen shot of the tagify jquery working with pieforms