Moodle demonstration site upgraded to 2.0

If you’ve been looking forward to exploring the newly released Moodle 2.0 as an admin, now’s your chance on our freshly upgraded Moodle demonstration site! Unless someone has logged in as an admin and just changed it, the site is using the stunning three column fluid-width theme for Moodle 2.0, Magazine, with thanks to John Stabinger, NewSchool Learning (source: Theme credits).

If you’re a Swedish speaker, you’ll be pleased to hear of a new course on the site Bekanta dig med Moodle, a translation of the features demo course by Jeff Forssell.

All content on the Moodle demonstration site is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License, unless otherwise stated, so if you’d like to use one of the courses on your own Moodle 2 site, you’re welcome to login as an admin or a teacher and create a course backup.

For many more Moodle 2 courses for download, please visit MOOCH, our moodle.org open community hub.

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Searching the Moodle tracker

These days I spend a fair bit of time searching the Moodle tracker to check whether problems with Moodle i.e. ‘bugs’ have been reported previously. I’ve discovered it’s not difficult to end up with thousands of search results! Thus, over time I’ve refined my search techniques. Here is how I usually manage to find what I am looking for:

1. Follow the Find issues link.
2. Select Moodle as the project and if necessary click where indicated to refresh the search menu.
3. If the problem has a very obvious component e.g. Quiz then select it.
4. For 2.0 bugs, select 2.0 as affected version.
5. Think of a word or phrase which is specific to the bug, such as an error message, and enter it in the text search box.
6. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click View.
7. Click the Updated column header to sort the search results so that the most recently updated issues are listed first. Generally any search results which don’t appear on the first page are pretty old and so far less relevant.

I usually find what I’m looking for by browsing the summaries on the first page of the search results. If not, then I conclude that the bug has not been reported.

Perhaps you also search the tracker in this way? Or maybe you can suggest further tips for improving search results? If so, please add a comment below.

If you come across a bug in Moodle but don’t have much time to search for it in the tracker, please just create a new issue for it. Don’t be afraid of creating a duplicate issue, as it’s better that bugs are reported twice than not at all!

Finally, many thanks to everyone who reports and comments on tracker issues. Your help is much appreciated!

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New languages for Moodle 2.0 – Tigrinia and Amharic

Moodle 2.0 is being translated into two new languages – Tigrinia and Amharic, thanks to translators Armando Di Pietra and Berhane Woldegabriel, and translation coordinator Koen Roggemans.

I’d never heard of either language before, so checked the Wikipedia articles Amharic language and Tigrinya language to discover that the languages are spoken in Ethiopia and Eritrea, and have around 25 million and 6.7 million speakers respectively.

The Tigrinia and Amharic language packs are only available for Moodle 2.0 and may be installed via Site Administration > Language > Language packs.

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Eight years old today! Happy Birthday to Moodle!

Moodle, our open source course management system, is eight years old today! It’s also the birthday of Moodle’s founder and lead developer, Martin, who is quite a bit more than eight years old today. Happy Birthday to Moodle and Martin!

Moodle usage continues to grow at an amazing rate, with over 52 thousand registered Moodle sites and over 950 thousand registered users on moodle.org (see Moodle statistics).

Here’s how moodle.org looked six years ago in August 2004 (from the Internet Archive Wayback Machine search):

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New Moodle language pack – Dzongkha

Moodle has a new language pack, Dzongkha, thanks to Tenzin Dendup and translation coordinator Koen Roggemans.

According to the Wikipedia article, Dzongkha language, Dzongkha is the official language of Bhutan, South Asia and is spoken by around 600 thousand people.

There are currently a total of 86 Moodle language packs for Moodle 1.x (source: Moodle download – Language packs). Many translators are currently working hard on Moodle 2.0 language packs. The Moodle 2.0 language packs download page shows the percentage of translated strings for each language. A big thank you to all our Moodle translators as listed in the Translation credits.

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