It’s a simple question with a complex answer: in a given academic term, what percentage of our Moodle courses are “active” (used by a faculty member in the teaching of their course). We have to start by figuring out what counts as a “course” in a term, and then come up with an inclusive measurement of activity.

Courses

The basic unit in Moodle is the course. We use the Banner/Luminis Message Broker plugin to create a course for each section of each course which is taught for a given term at Lafayette. Each of these courses has an idnumber which corresponds to the section’s CRN. An exception is crosslisted courses; the LMB plugin creates a merged course with a special idnumber.

Read More

Moodle 3.2 introduced the concept of end dates for courses. Moodle 3.3 added a new Course Overview block which uses end dates to determinate whether a course is in progress, in the past, or in the future. This is pretty great, unless you’re in the following situation:

• Your school has five years worth of courses
• Those courses don’t have end dates

Congratulations—you now have five years of courses in progress. Your faculty will have five pages worth of past courses on the Course Overview block! That’s probably undesirable. To avoid it, I’m writing a plugin that lets an administrator set course start and end dates at the category level. While working on it, I ran an interesting edge case with Behat acceptance tests, reminding me that you’d best treat Behat like it's a real user.

Read More

Eighteen months ago we had an anomalous problem where video playback didn’t work on some, but not all, of our WordPress multisites. Videos wouldn’t play, or would play but wouldn’t seek. The problem was confined to local uploads embedded in a page. Videos from YouTube played fine; if you viewed the video directly playback worked as expected.

The problem turned out to be long-standing issue with how ms-files.php served up files from pre-WordPress 3.5 multisites. Solutions had floated around for years. Our problem was describing the problem with enough specificity to actually find the right solution.

Past is prologue

Read More

I’ve written about how we used Composer to overlay a dependency management system on our existing WordPress ecosystem. The final step was to actually deploy the site somewhere. For that we turned to Capistrano.

Capistrano

Capistrano is a Ruby application which manages the deployed state of a project. Within a “Capified” project, you define all the information needed to deploy that project somewhere:

Read More

I’ve described how Lafayette’s deployment strategy involved pushing rocks uphill. A key change in our thinking came when we started treating each of our WordPress multisite installations as its own software project, with its own dependencies and lifecycle. Enabling this pivot was a technology which wasn’t mature in 2013: Composer.

What is Composer?

Composer is a package manager for PHP. It fills a role similar to npm for Node.js and bundler for Ruby. It uses a JSON file to capture metadata about the project and the project’s dependencies. If you have a custom application built on Symfony and Silex, your composer.json file might look like this:

Read More

For three years Lafayette’s official WordPress deployment strategy was to push rocks uphill. This was a doubtful plan, but it represented an improvement over its predecessor, which was to stare at the rocks doubtfully, then roll them around a field at random. Here follows a warning to others.

Git all the things!

In 2013 we had embraced git with the fervor of the converted. Applying this to WordPress was difficult. WordPress.org gave us two options for getting themes and plugins:

Read More

This is a story about adding a little knowledge to the public internet.

A few weeks ago I went looking for information on the Morrison-Knudsen TE70-4S diesel locomotive. It’s an oddball; a rebuild of a General Electric U25B with a Sulzer engine. Only four conversions were done, all for the Southern Pacific Railroad, and they were unsuccessful. There isn’t much information on the internet about them.

Read More

I’ve started using Tesseract to add an optical character recognition (OCR) layer to PDFs. What follows are my notes on getting this to a reasonable state, and a word of warning about Preview on Sierra.

Background

I’ve written about my collection of articles before. They’re all PDFs and indexed in Zotero. Their source various: some are distillations of digital documents, some are scans from print or microfilm. Some, but especially the latter, haven’t been through OCR so they aren’t searchable. That’s not a big deal in a 1-2 page article, but in longer works it’s obnoxious. Adding OCR also exposes the text to Spotlight, OS X’s internal search.

Read More

At the end of my blog post about Hammerspoon and case conversion" I had this aside: ” …it works well for storing electronic articles and books.” I’m going to expand a little on that and how it fits into my scheme for organizing information. Hat-tip to nateofnine for prodding me into sharing this.

The Library of Zotero

Read More

In 2016 Lafayette College began maintaining the LDAP Syncing Scripts (local_ldap) plugin after the tragic death of the previous maintainer, Patrick Pollet.

I didn’t know Patrick but he had a strong reputation in the Moodle community. I’m pleased to say that we made few substantive changes to his code. Most of the changes were simple updates, such as migrating the command-line/cron scripts to Moodle’s task infrastructure, and various nit-picky code standards issues which didn’t affect functionality.

PHPUnit

Read More