Liven up the Participants List by changing the City field into Hobby

How would you like to have a Hobby field show up in the Participants List in Moodle 1.9? Well it can be done! Charles Kelly of http://www.manythings.org has done it and in this blog post I will show you how.

Why should it be done? In my humble opinion, knowing that you come from Melaka or Kansas City is not as interesting as knowing that you have a liking for Pink Floyd, Manchester City Football Club or body building. How can we do this? Two steps. First: change the City field's display name to "Hobby / Interest / Free Time". Secondly, modify the length of City field from a measly 20 characters to a generous 100 characters.

Doug Moody's Album blockalbum.php for Moodle 2.2.

Yesterday, Doug Moody shared a php file on this Moodle.org discussion thread. Doug's file displays user pictures by group. It is based on the index.php script in the userpix directory. It can also display the user images pictures up to 200 pixels and display the names of each student under each image. The code is useful for creating a class album, or a picture book.

"I teach 12 classes, and wanted to put together a picture book that would break out the classes separately. It is fantastic to help students get to know each other."

Place album.php in the userpix directory in your Moodle 2.2 site. Usage is as follows:

http://[site url]/[moodle directory]/userpix/album.php?group=[group name]&size=[size in pixels]

For example:
http://moodurian.com/m2/userpix/album.php?group=techs&size=64

Welcome to dev.moodlebites.com – a single location to demo Moodle 2.x plugins

Moodle is a rich LMS. It is made richer by the wealth of third-party plugins that extend your Moodle site’s functionality. When sourcing for plugins, where does one start?  The most obvious would be to go to Moodle.org’s Plugins Directory.

For those who are still using Moodle 1.9.x, I would like to recommend this French-Canadian site for a comprehensive listing of “Potentially great” Moodle 1.9 plugins.

If you’re using Moodle 2.x, then it might interest you to know that http://dev.moodlebites.com is a Moodle 2.2.3 site setup by Stuart Mealor that allows you to test many Moodle 2 plugins. Expect it to be upgraded to Moodle 2.3 soon.

See the image below? Well, I managed to create my own “Frankie Kam” self-enrolled user account and thus am able to do more than what the Guest account affords me (think forum posts and other activities).

The site allows you to try out many Moodle 2.x plugins, filters and blocks in a safe environment.

The primary purpose of this site is to have a single location that demonstrates many of the things that are possible with non-standard blocks, modules, filters and plugins in Moodle 2.

The site currently has 35 plugins, listed alphabetically. Expect more to be added as Moodle 2.x matures and develops over time.

Read more at Moodlenews.com here.

Cheers,
Frankie Kam