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by Marie Achour.  

Hello Moodlers,

 

Welcome to this edition of ‘Showcase Shorts’!

 

It’s been a very busy time at Moodle Products over the last few weeks, with many of our team members attending MoodleMoot Global in Merida, Mexico. We had a blast spending time with over 350 members of our community, celebrating all things Moodle with them. The event’s agenda was full of fantastic talks, which can be viewed on the Moodle YouTube channel, our ever popular Jam events, and the famous Moodle Party.

 

On November 5th, we were very proud to announce the release of Moodle Workplace 4.5. From advanced course discovery and curated offerings in the Learning Catalogue, to AI-driven tools designed to elevate content creation, the new release focuses on making learning more engaging, accessible, and tailored. We invite you to find out all about its benefits by checking out our release announcement. 

 

Upon returning from Mexico, the team dived right into planning mode to finalise our plans for the next  Moodle LMS and Moodle Workplace releases. 

 

Some of the highlights you can expect to see come to life include:

• A range of new AI-driven functionality, including integration options with more AI providers (AWS Bedrock and Ollama are next on our list) and new capabilities to help students get more out of their learning experiences in Moodle, such as actions to support translations and other personalisation of learning content options (check out the roadmap for all the details)!

• Much-needed improvements to the Assignment Grader experience, making grading easier for teachers (check out the prototypes here & here to see where we are heading)

• Optimisations to our Administration Settings, including smarter search functionality and more user-friendly descriptions of key settings (MFA settings will be first off the rank).

• The retiring of functionality that make Moodle harder to use and run than it should be, including the removal of the Chat & Survey tools, the Atto text editor and support for Oracle Databases (don’t worry, Chat, Survey and Atto will remain available as plugins for the few of you who still need them).

• More goodness for LTI lovers, with the migration of mod_lti into core. This will enable the use of LTI placements in the text editor, course navigation and assignments (find out more here).

• The launch of support for SMS notifications, critical for everyone in the world who doesn’t always have access to the internet but still wants to stay connected to their learning (which is still more than 34% of the world’s population – about 2.6 billion people!).

• For our Workplace customers, you can expect to see data visualisations come to report builder (charts are coming!), improvements to multi-tenant settings, programs available in the course catalogue and, the much much requested ‘user in multiple tenants’ functionality.

 

We will also complete our next MUA project, the upgrade to Bootstrap 5.0, and all our products (including our beloved Mobile Applications) will go through their annual accessibility audits and be certified to WCAG 2.2 (vs 2.1) for the first time.

 

With all the travel and the planning work, we don’t have a lot to share in terms of demo videos this time around, but we did think you’d like to see what a team gets up to during a release sprint, so here is the Showcase Short from the Moodle Workplace team in full. You’ll notice they don’t stop for a release, and the improvements keep coming!

Go to the forum to see the video! 

That’s it for this edition of our ‘Showcase Shorts’; we hope you’ve enjoyed the updates.

 

Until Next Sprint!

The Moodle Product Team

Today we are talking about being the CTO of the Drupal Association, How the job has changed, and How its impacted Drupal with guests Josh Mitchell & Tim Lehnen. We’ll also cover Automatic Anchors as our module of the week.

For show notes visit: https://www.talkingDrupal.com/477

Topics

• How long ago were you CTO Josh
• Tim when did you take over
• DA infrastructure
• Drupal Credit System
• Josh’s proudest moment
• Tim’s proudest moment
• Growth
• Josh if you could do one thing differently
• Tim if you could make one change
• Future of the CTO job

Resources

• OOP Hook conversion
• Oregon State University Open Source Lab
• Whuffie: Cory doctorow Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
• Rethink weighing of contrib projects and credits

Guests

Tim Lehnen – aspenthornpress.com hestenet

Hosts

Nic Laflin – nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan John Picozzi – epam.com johnpicozzi Joshua “Josh” Mitchell – joshuami.com joshuami

MOTW Correspondent

Martin Anderson-Clutz – mandclu.com mandclu

• Brief description:
  • Have you ever wanted headings on your Drupal site to have unique id values, so links can be created to take users to specific parts of any page? There’s a module for that.
• Module name/project name:
  • Automatic Anchors
• Brief history
  • How old: created in Jun 2020 by Chris Komlenic (komlenic) of Penn State
  • Versions available: 2.1.1-beta1, which supports Drupal 8.8, 9, and 10
• Maintainership
  • Test coverage
  • Number of open issues: x open issues, y of which are bugs against the current branch
• Usage stats:
  • 137 sites
• Module features and usage
  • By default, the module automatically generates ids on , , , , and elements within the page content
  • Even if two headings have the same content, the module will make sure their ids are unique, as well as making sure they are i18n-friendly, use hyphens instead of spaces, and are short enough to be useful
  • The module won’t interfere with or change manually-added or already-existing HTML ids
  • There’s a permission to view helpful links on each heading that the ids obvious and easy to copy
  • Configuration options include the root element it should look within (defaults to the body tag), which elements should get ids, what content to use for the displayed links, and whether or not generate ids on admin pages

Here’s a short post on using non-root users to connect to servers managed by Kamal.

There are so many ecological, environmental, and climate problems and disasters taking place all over the world that it’s sometimes hard to see the burning forests through the charred tree stumps. As at best middle-income individuals living in this corporate line-must-go-up hellscape, there’s only so much we can do turn the rising tides of fascism and leave at least a semblance of a livable world for our children and grandchildren. Of course, the most elementary thing we can do is not vote for science-denying death cults who believe everything is some non-existent entity’s grand plan, but other than that, what’s really our impact if we drive a little less or use paper straws, when some wealthy robber baron flying his private jet to Florida to kiss the gaudy gold ring to signal his obedience does more damage to our world in one flight than we do in a year of driving to our underpaid, expendable job? Income, financial, health, and other circumstances allowing, all we can do are the little things to make ourselves feel better, usually in areas in which we are knowledgeable. In technology, it might seem like there’s not a whole lot we can do, but actually there’s quite a few steps we can take. One of the biggest things you, as an individual knowledgeable about and interested in tech, can do to give the elite and ruling class the finger is to move away from big tech, their products, and their services – no more Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, or Amazon. This is often a long, tedious, and difficult process, as most of us will discover that we rely on a lot more big tech products than we initially thought. It’s like an onion that looks shiny and tasty on the outside, but is rotting from the inside – the more layers you peel away, the dirtier and nastier it gets. Also you start crying. I’ve been in the process of eradicating as much of big tech out of my life for a long time now. Since four or five years ago, all my desktop and laptop PCs run Linux, from my dual-Xeon workstation to my high-end gaming PC (ignore that spare parts PC that runs Windows just for League of Legends. That stupid game is my guilty pleasure and I will not give it up), from my XPS 13 laptop to my little Home Assistant thin client. I’ve never ordered a single thing from Amazon and have no Prime subscription or whatever it is, so that one was a freebie. Apple I banished from my life long ago, so that’s another freebie. Sadly, that other device most of us carry with us remained solidly in the big tech camp, as I’ve been using an Android phone for a long time, filled to the brim with Google products, applications, and services. There really isn’t a viable alternative to the Android and iOS duopoly. Or is there? Well, in a roundabout way, there is an alternative to iOS and Google’s Android. You can’t do much to take the Apple out of an iPhone, but there’s a lot you can do to take the Google out of an Android phone. Unless or until an independent third platform ever manages to take serious hold – godspeed, our saviour – de-Googled Android, as it’s called, is your best bet at having a fully functional, modern smartphone that’s as free from big tech as you want it to be, without leaving you with a barely usable, barebones experience. While you can install a de-Googled ROM yourself, as there’s countless to choose from, this is not an option for everyone, since not everyone has the skills, time, and/or supported devices to do so. Murenia, Fairphone, and sustainable mining This is where Murena comes in. Murena is a French company – founded by Gaël Duval, of Mandrake Linux fame – that develops /e/OS, a de-Googled Android using microG (which Murena also supports financially), which it makes available for anyone to install on supported devices, while also selling various devices with /e/OS preinstalled. Murena goes one step further, however, by also offering something called Murena Workspace – a branded Nextcloud offering that works seamlessly with /e/OS. In other words, if you buy an /e/OS smartphone from Murena, you get the complete package of smartphone, mobile operating system, and cloud services that’s very similar to buying a regular Android phone or an iPhone. To help me test this complete package of smartphone, de-Googled Android, and cloud services, Murena loaned me a Fairphone 5 with /e/OS preinstalled, and while this article mostly focuses on the /e/OS experience, we should first talk a little bit about the relationship between Murena and Fairphone. Murena and Fairphone are partners, and Murena has been selling /e/OS Fairphones for a while now. Most of us will be familiar with Fairphone – it’s a Dutch company focused on designing and selling smartphones and related accessories that are are user-repairable and long-lasting, while also trying everything within their power to give full insight into their supply chain. This is important, because every smartphone contains quite a few materials that are unsustainably mined. Many mines are destructive to the environment, have horrible working conditions, or even sink as low as employing children. Even companies priding themselves on being environmentally responsible and sustainable, like Apple, are guilty of partaking in and propping up such mining endeavours. As consumers, there isn’t much we can do – the network of supply chains involved in making a smartphone is incredibly complex and opaque, and there’s basically nothing normal people can do to really fully know on whose underpaid or even underage shoulders their smartphone is built. This holiday season, Murena and Fairphone are collaborating on exactly this issue of the conditions in mines used to acquire the metals and minerals in our phones. Instead of offering big discounts (that barely eat into margins and often follow sharp price increases right before the holidays), Murena and Fairphone will donate