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.

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!

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.

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):

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.

To ensure the remaining tests pass as soon as possible, testers please

• Make sure that each test failure is reported as an MDL issue for developers to investigate and fix, creating a new issue if necessary
• Link the MDL issue to the QA test (MDLQA issue)

Once fixed, the QA test can be reset and then run again.

There’s still plenty of space in our testers group for more members, so if you’d like to get involved, please see the discussion Help needed with QA testing and the documentation QA testing.

With the help of our core developers, let’s aim for a 100% pass rate for the Moodle 2.0 QA Cycle 1 by the end of the week!

• Web conferencing plugins – for discussions about Adobe Connect, BigBlueButton, DimDim, Elluminate and OpenMeetings and other web conferencing plugins
• Moodle for mobile – for discussions about Moodle on mobile devices

Elsewhere in Using Moodle, Moodle HQ senior developer Sam Hemelryk announced his CSS theme tool block for Moodle 2.0 (a “phenomenal bit of work” according to Martin) and Moodle translation coordinator Koen Roggemans announced that the Moodle languages portal was ready for translators. Thanks to Moodle HQ developer David Mudrák for developing the Moodle languages portal translation tool AMOS.

So far I’ve been in contact with members of the testers group in the Tracker (created long ago) to check whether they wish to help with Moodle 2.0 testing, and if the answer is yes then I’ve added them to the testers group in Using Moodle.

If you’d like to help with Moodle 2.0 testing and be included in the testers group, please keep an eye on the Testing and QA forum (either by subscribing or via the RSS feed) for details to be posted soon of what needs doing.

Everyone is welcome to help with testing and QA to ensure Moodle 2.0 is the best release ever!

PS Thanks to developer Hubert Chathi for creating such a cool testers group icon :-)

You’ve most likely heard that we’re aiming to release Moodle 2.0 beta very soon, so we’re all trying our best to get everything done! I’ve been helping David Mudrak with the big language pack clean-up in Moodle 2.0 (MDL-15252) and am currently busy creating help strings from HTML files (see Development:Help strings).

For the non-twitter followers amongst you, here are a few links to interesting discussions on moodle.org in the past couple of weeks: a pedagogical discussion about testing, Moodle Philosophy (dating back to 2002), Ability to post anonymously, Office Add-in for Moodle (with replies from Microsoft Education Labs), Best way to share many links and Teaching moodle to teachers.

Finally, thanks to particularly helpful Moodler Mary Evans for her lovely poem Ode to Moodle Docs.

The modules and plugins database, “a comprehensive reference of all known Moodle modules, hacks and plugins”, was created four years ago and now contains 630 entries! The very first entry was added on 3 February 2006 and was the Database activity module itself.

Before going ahead and installing a contributed module or plugin, it’s important to take note of the following:

WARNING: Please be aware that some of these items have not been reviewed, and the quality and/or suitability for your Moodle site has not been checked. The modules here may have security problems, data-loss problems, interface problems or just plain not work. Please think carefully about maintenance before relying on contributed code in your production site, as some of this code may not work with future versions of Moodle.

(Source: modules and plugins database introduction)

Whilst the modules and plugins database allows comments and ratings, it’s clearly lacking a number of features for helping people make sensible choices about which module or plugin to install. Major improvements to the database are planned for the future (see Development:Modules and plugins improvements, MDLSITE-571 and MDLSITE-406), however the work will have to wait until after the release of Moodle 2.0.

For those of you who are twitter fans, twitter.com/moodleplugins tweets new entries to the modules and plugins database.