Last week I spent reading and doing some research on Moodle 2.0. I also fixed a couple of minor usability bugs in the course format. Nothing too big. I tested the course format some more. After reading more in the forums, it looks like I should start to focus on porting the timeline course format to Moodle 2.0. The main outstanding issue or weight on the back of my mind for moodle 1.9.5 is javascript performance. This only affects Internet explorer and Gecko based browsers. I have looked at this javascript issue. The main problem is DOM manipulation. It is hard to modify this because it makes sure that all course formats that are ajax capable have a similar set of buttons in the page. I have tried using innerHTML to add the needed elements, but I ended up having to rely on objects. This proved to be a good exercise, but didn’t provide me with better results.
I mostly have done the gsoc work in a git repository located at: http://repo.or.cz/w/moodle-blog-course-format.git . I love working with git, but people cannot checkout just the timeline course format out of the repo. I also updated last week the cvs copy of my course format so that it contains the updates in the git repo. Thanks to Anthony and Jordan I have access to a cvs directory in contrib where I keep another copy of the course format: http://cvs.moodle.org/contrib/plugins/course/format/timeline/ .
From the activity that I see in the forums and in code development, it seems that it is a good time for me to start moving my focus to Moodle 2.0. I don’t expect porting the course format to be a lot of work. By starting to work in the course format early on, I hope to provide feedback and maybe port some of the features of the timeline course format into other course formats. This would hopefully lead to longer courses and shine some light on performance.
Edit: I guess I forgot to click the published button for this post (bad floppy )