Rev up Moodle 2.3 and 2.4.1 usability with Davo Smith's "Drag and Drop Image into labels" improvement

On of the major weaknesses of Moodle over the past few years is usability and ease of use. Compared to what? Well, compared to Facebook or Google Plus. A major archilles heel of Moodle is the sheer number of mouse clicks you need to add an image to your course page. 14 steps to add an image? That's enough to put any harrassed teacher off Moodle initiation. But Moodle's really getting better, ever since Moodle 2.3 came out.
                    Today's post will introduce you to yet another improvement to core Moodle 2.x code that will make your life, as a course teacher, easier. If you liked Davo Smith's or Moodle 2.3's built-in drag and drop file upload, you will love his new, yet-to-be core Drag and Drop Image (DaDI) improvement update. It works on Moodle 2.3 and 2.4.1. I've installed the 5-file-patch on my Moodle 2.4.1 production site. And I'm loving it. It makes my Moodle course administration experience all-the-more enjoyable.

DaDi in action on my brand new Moodle 2.4.1 production site.

Figure 1. Dragging an image file to my coursepage,
Seconds after releasing the mouse button.

Happy Chinese New Year Of The Snake 2013

A happy Chinese New Year greeting to all my readers.

Bahasa Malaysia: Selamat Tahun Baru Cina

The Malaysian Chinese Christian celebrates Chinese New Year, Christmas, Easter, and enjoys all major holidays in Malaysia, and eats every Malaysian delicacy. Praise God for Malaysia.

Best wishes
Frankie Kam and family

Making Moodle more SOCIAL and FUN.

Making Moodle More Social and Fun

I presented this at University Malaya on Thursday 7th February 2012. Hope you enjoy the tips.



Thanks for viewing. Any comments?

Frankie Kam

Liven up the Participants List (People Block) in Moodle 2.4 by changing the City field into Hobby

How would you like to have a Hobby field show up in the Participants List in Moodle 2? Well it can be done! Charles Kelly of http://www.manythings.org had shown how it could be done in Moodle 1.9  here. The purpose of my blog post today, is to show you how to do it for your Moodle 2.x (tested on 2.4) site. I had previously blogged about doing the hack for Moodle 1.9 post here. The good news is that it's easier to do this for Moodle 2.x.

What’s the benefit of doing this? In my humble opinion, knowing that you come from Wellington or Kuantan is not as interesting as knowing that you have a liking for Psy, Bradfort City Football Club or rearing Beagle pups. How can we do this? In Moodle 2.x, you just need to do one mandatory step.

• Firstly, change the City field’s display name to “Hobby / Interest / Free Time”.
• Secondly (this step is optional), modify the length of City field from an already generous 120 characters to N characters.

Figure 1. What the Participants List looks like. Note that some users had earlier typed their City data since I only recently implemented the hack.