04 April 2013, 22:59

Hi!

We are hoping to work with Mediacore this academic year. They seem to be a great solution for hosting video and audio.

They already have a filter for Moodle which places a button into the HTML editor, allowing the user to browse their uploaded video and audio and embed it into their text box/page.

Is it possible to do this with Mahara? I would have no idea where to start. Is it something a developer could do and - if so - what should I expect to pay?

Hope someone can help!

Dan 

05 April 2013, 10:14

Hi Dan,

I took a look at the source code for the Mediacore Moodle plugin ( https://github.com/mediacore/mediacore-moodle ). At a glance, I'd say it would require some developer work to adapt it to Mahara. We use the same HTML editor as Moodle, TinyMCE, so you could probably copy that across and use the video-picking part of it. But it seems that what the TinyMCE plugin does is insert a placeholder string into the text, and then it uses a Moodle filter plugin to convert that placeholder into the actual mediacore embed code. (This is a common Moodle coding pattern, to accomodate Moodle's HTML cleaning code.) Mahara doesn't have the same filter plugin API as Moodle, so you'd need to rewrite that part, possibly as an html_purifier filter. I'd ballpark it as maybe a week of work.

Alternately, if you can embed Mediacore movies as iframes, you could add it to your "Allowed iFrame Sources" ( http://manual.mahara.org/en/1.6/administration/extensions.html#new-in-mahara-1-6-allowed-iframe-sources ) and paste in the code using TinyMCE's HTML editor mode. But that is pretty clunky for non-technical students to use. We recently had a wishlist request for an "embed" button, which would simplify the process: https://bugs.launchpad.net/mahara/+bug/1163682 . But of course then you wouldn't get that sweet video picker.

Cheers,
Aaron

05 April 2013, 20:54

Hi Aaron

Thanks for the feedback.

Our students have some idea of how to use HTML editors (they had to use it to embed Soundcloud players in Moodle), but, as always, simplicity is best.

Kristina's been in touch :)

dan