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Comments on feature proposals /
Make Mahara assignment type work with Moodle 2.3+


Kristina Hoeppner's profile picture
Posts: 4736

12 June 2014, 13:57

Hello Ruslan,

Great. Thank you. Someone will take a look as soon as possible.

Cheers

Kristina

 

Ruslan Kabalin's profile picture
Posts: 146

23 May 2014, 21:01

Hello Shane,

The nature of open source implies that anyone can develop plugin and share it with the community. Tony Box was the first who registered his plugin with Moodle directory (that is why the name assignsubmission_mahara is taken). The fact it it there, however does not mean it is supported by MoodleHQ, it is maintained by plugin author only.

Tony's plugin was released few weeks earlier than we (Lancaster University) shared our plugin with community (the one that has been extended and just released by CatalystIT). I was not aware about his work before the plugin was released, but this did not stop us to share our version. First, because it had different funtionality (we made some changes accepted in Moodle core to make our plugin work), second, it included some bits coming from conversation with people on last MaharaUK.

So, that is how we ended up with two plugins. The differences are listed on wiki page, you may see at the bottom of wiki links to relevant conversations on Moodle forum as well.

anonymous profile picture
Account deleted
Posts: 34

24 May 2014, 21:54

Thanks Rusan,

We would like to invest in the replacement of MNET with LTI in the plugin. Until a day ago we had planned to invest in your plugin, but the plugin from Tony Box has raised the question of which is better to base further development on? lTI as you know is a significant investment and we would like the investment to be long term. The answer largely comes down to which plugin the core Moodle/Mahara developers are going to comit to - assuming there is consesus at all?

I'm hoping perhaps the community can decide to make one really brilliant plugin that mature quickly and benefit from joint investment.

Personally, having used GNU/Linux for 20 years for exmple, after being on the receiving end of ubuntu (et.al) swaping programs and systems out for competing projects and back again over the years e.g Banshee vs Rhythmbox (and all of them being half finished or starting over), I ended up migrating to OSX.

I'm hoping to resolve the issue of, now we have two plugins, which is the better base for moving forward with LTI.

Aaron Wells's profile picture
Posts: 896

27 May 2014, 19:02

Hi Shane,

Hm, the patch that you sent to me for displaying drafts is indeed for the version of the plugin developed by Tony Box. It looks like it may be generic enough to apply easily to the Lancaster/Catalyst plugin as well, though.

I agree it's less than ideal that there are now two Mahara-Moodle assignment submission plugins. It's on my always-growing todo list, to talk to Tony about integrating the two of them. Or at least email him to let him know about the changes I'm upstreaming to Mahara's web services to support collections, so he can adapt his version of the plugin to support collections as well. (I've tried to engineer these changes so that they will be backwards compatible, so they shouldn't break his plugin.)

I looked into both plugins before doing my recent work to expand the plugin to support collections. My opinion at the time, was that Tony's plugin has a more user-friendly front-end interface, but Ruslan's version had code that I found it easier to work with on the back-end. Given the development time I had available, I went with Ruslan's version.

Cheers,

Aaron

Ruslan Kabalin's profile picture
Posts: 146

27 May 2014, 20:23

Tony actually asked in the forum about possibility of integration both onto one, shame on me, I did not have chance to look at his version and work on integration. So, I think he is open to discuss possiblity of merging good interface bits from his plugin into Lancaster/Catalyst one, and potentially even having the resulting plugin published in Moodle directory under the name assignsubmission_mahara ))

anonymous profile picture
Account deleted
Posts: 34

28 May 2014, 11:23

Thanks Aaron, Ruslan,

As I mentioned we are close to signing off on the LTI integration for Ruslans code base.

However we are also about get sign off for the plugin enhancements for Ruslans code that seem to already exist in Tony's code.

Aaron - We are currently in the process of approving the enhancements quote - but I really don't want to pay for code to be developed that already exists. We would much rather redirect that money to have Tony's code merged in - assuming the cost is equal or lower than the current enhacements quote.

How quickly would this quote revision be made - assuming you have the time and this is the direction agree we should go in.

 

Thanks!!!!!!

Don Presant's profile picture
Posts: 255

16 August 2014, 4:55

Hi:

This is a little out of my technology comfort zone, so bear with me...

I'm working with a university connecting Mahoodle for assignment submission...using Ruslan's plugin that Aaron links to here:
https://github.com/catalyst/assignsubmission_mahara

However, it's not as well documented as the great presentation posted by Iñaki Arenaza back in 2011 here:
https://wiki.mahara.org/images/7/75/Mahoodle-updated-en.pdf

Is that still valid? Seems it was this time last year...:
System Administrator's Guide/Moodle//Mahara Integration
https://wiki.mahara.org/index.php?title=System_Administrator%27s_Guide/Moodle%2F%2FMahara_Integration

If so, we lack some XML-RPC resources, specifically:
"Please install the XML-RPC, Curl and OpenSSL PHP extensions"

Should these have been part of a standard installation for our Mahara 1.9? What's the best way of getting them in now?

I see them as separate resources on a page from 2006 here...are they still good?
http://sourcecodebrowser.com/mahara/1.1.7/auth_8xmlrpc_8php.html

Any insights welcome...if we need to get changes made at the PHP level we need support from another department, so we need to be as specific as possible.

Thanks!

 

 

 

Aaron Wells's profile picture
Posts: 896

18 August 2014, 18:17

Hi Don,

The PHP extensions we're talking about, are modules of PHP itself.

http://nz1.php.net/manual/en/openssl.installation.php

http://nz1.php.net/manual/en/xmlrpc.installation.php

http://nz1.php.net/manual/en/curl.installation.php

How you install these will depend on your operating system. In Ubuntu Linux, the OpenSSL extension is part of the standard PHP distribution, and you can install the other two by installing the apt packages "php5-xmlrpc", and "php5-curl".

Cheers,

Aaron

Don Presant's profile picture
Posts: 255

19 August 2014, 0:06

Thanks Aaron, I'll pass that on.

Scott Gage's profile picture
Posts: 64

29 August 2014, 11:11

Hi All,

We're now using this plugin and things are going well - however, is there any institutions out there with TurnItIn support? We're leaving it off for that assignment type for now, but a lot of academics would be keen for it to happen. Does Mahara submission work with TurnItIn or would we need to wait for something like this option https://wiki.mahara.org/index.php/Developer_Area/Specifications_in_Development/Moodle_LTI_integration where we can then submit the archived pages to TII?

Cheers,

Scott