[Server-devel] Looking at edublog moodle code --

[Martin Langhoff]

On Thu, Sep 18, 2008 at 7:13 AM, Tarun Pondicherry
<tarunpondicherry at gmail.com> wrote:
> Really sorry for the newb mistakes.  This is my first time on a project
> where the repository is actually significant.  I'll be sure to pay close
> attention to my commits in the future.

Hey - no problem.

> The Moodle I used as a base is from: http://korpelainen.net/weekly19.zip
> linked from the forum discussion at:
> http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=96160

That's a tricky one, so you started from Mauno's snapshot, which has
all sorts of very odd things in it. Ok...

> The reason is that the Moodle in the catalyst repo had a 1/2 done tinyMCE
> integration and it was *really* frustrating to figure out what functions did
> what you'd think they did or were just "to be implemented type things".
>  However, after working with it for the summer, I think I can probably patch
> tinyMCE into the catalyst version.

Ok. From the 'catalyst' repo, I am basing my work on a branch based on
MOODLE_19_STABLE -

> On top of that, I simply copied in the OU Blog module and a theme, but those
> are self contained in their respective directories.

That's good to know...

> All that needs to be done to get tinyMCE working is to enable tinyMCE and
> copy in the Sugar theme folder and change one line to let in moodlelib.php
> to tell it to send an editor to the XO (not a textarea).  This will give a
> demoable version with patchy localization support, patchy file upload and
> will need to fall back to HTMLArea in IE.

Right. I think that for this release cycle (closing mid-next-week)
I'll leave tinyMCE alone. This is quite a bit of work...

> Anyway, I believe I should be cleaning up the messes I create, so I'll try
> to write two patches based on the current moodle-r2 code in catalyst (1-
> enable tinyMCE, 2-integrate the Sugar theme).  With some luck I should be
> done by Monday.

That sounds like a large-ish job. If you do it, I'll take them, but no
pressure. They aren't hugely important (yet).

> With regards to future maintainability of EduBlog, I think I'd like to split
> it up into a "Sugar tinyMCE editor" branch that has changes to pertaining
> how that would work and a "OU Blog Branch" that contains the actual changes
> for ou blog.  Is this the sort of thing branches are meant for?

That's one way -  you can have "topic branches" and merge them into an
"integration" branch. In practice, I think that ends up
overcomplicating things. Your edublog branch will have a few topics
(editor, theme, upload tricks, oublog patches) and you need to put
that at the beginning of the commit msg anyway. So my recommendation
is a single branch with well written commit msgs...

One case where you will want separate topic branches is when you have
2 "integration" branches for some reason - like several clients, each
with its own theme, but each using various "features" each in its
topic branch. The catalyst repo shows some examples of this :-) but
it's such a pain to use that they have a 'mdl19-local' branch where
all the "popular" topics are -- they only do topic branches for
specific things.

cheers,



martin
-- 
 martin.langhoff at gmail.com
 martin at laptop.org -- School Server Architect
 - ask interesting questions
 - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first
 - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff