On this page are some useful tools and patches which relate to out work with the Learning Platform which we are making available under the GNU GPL Licence. At the present time, no attempt has been made to work out if any of the stuff presented here works outside of the context of our own requirements. Autotrain accepts no liability for anything whatsoever that might go wrong as a result of using any software downloaded from these pages.
Patches (as opposed to separate tools) are supplied as unix 'diff' files which can be applied using the unix 'patch' command. Windows users should be able to do this using the Cygwin environment to run the unix tools. Hint, if using cygwin, type 'mount' and you then find that the normal windows drives are available on '/cygdrive/c' for C:, '/cygdrive/d' for D: etc.
Important Note : These modules/patches are for system administrators only and require file level access to the server that runs Moodle. If you are not the administrator of your Moodle server, you will not be able to install these modules/patches.
If you are interested in the AutoView Presenter Moodle Module, please see the separate AutoView website on http://autoview.autotrain.org
Note for IE users :These downloads are unix/linux .tar.gz files. IE sometimes manages to mangle the file extension and will save the file as .tar.tar. If you change it back to .tar.gz then the files should work fine with winzip on windows.
Moodle Resume and Course Start Button Modules (Last update 1/12/08)
This download contains a simple module which provides a function which allows moodle users to have an automatic bookmark of the last resource or module page they viewed in a moodle course, so that they can easily resume viewing course material after a break. This is similar to the WebCT 'Continue where I left off' function'. For Moodle 1.5.3 and above, there is also a 'Start Course' module which takes the user to the first resource or module in the course.
Download the resume button and start button modules :
- for Moodle 1.9 (Activity block patch updated, everything else the same)
- for Moodle 1.8 (Now with XML database schema)
- for Moodle 1.6 (Should work on Moodle 1.7 as well)
- for Moodle 1.5.3
- for Moodle 1.2.1 and 1.3.4 (Resume function only)
Amazon Associates Block (Last update 4/12/08)
This block allows you to put Amazon associates book links into your Moodle as a standard block.
The block has locale configuration data for the UK and US only. A German translation and settings have now been added, but these are untested and believed to be buggy. If you want to add settings for other countries, then contact us.
Download Amazon Associates block :
Collapsible Content Display Course Format/Patch (Last update 1/12/08)
The aim of this patch is to provide a collapsible/expandable display in the course home page for all of the resources stored within each topic. eg instead of getting :
Topic name page 1 page 2 page 3 page 4
You will now see :
Topic name Go to this section + Show section content
Clicking show content will give you :
Topic name Go to this section - Hide section content page 1 page 2 page 3 page 4
This effect does not trigger in all cases. The rules are as follows :
- The top topic, usually unnumbered and in our case used for course tools etc is not collapsed.
- The collapsible sections are only used if a course contains 2 or more topics and the section in question contains 3 or more titles. The logic being that courses with only 1 section are probably too short for this to be necessary.
- Collapsible sections are disabled when in editing mode.
- This patch is currently only works for the 'topics' course format, but it should be possible to activate it for other course types by editing the course/format/*/*php files to included it.
The technique used to achieve the collapsible elements is detailed in the tutorial on http://www.webreference.com/programming/css_content/. This patch is tested and works in KDE Konqueror, Mozilla, Opera and IE. Under Netscape 4, the collapsible elements don't function, so pages will still display in full without any collapsible elements.
For Moodle 1.7 and onwards this patch is now designed to act as a separate course format based on the topics format, rather than patching the original topics format, so that both the original and patched version can be used on the same server according to user preference.
The patch currently supports Moodle 1.2.1, 1.3.4, 1.4.2, 1.5.3, 1.6, 1.7, 1.8 and 1.9.
Download the content display patch
IMS (as generated by WebCT 3.6) to Moodle 1.4 course conversion tool
This tool was written purely for our own purposes to enable automated conversion of our existing WebCT courses into Moodle backup format so that we could migrate basic course material with minimal hassle. It will only work for course material and glossaries, although some work was attempted relating to quizzes, this doesn't yet function and is disabled.
This tool works using the IMS files exported from WebCT. It has been tested and works with our own course content as exported from WebCT 3.6, it may or not work for other content and other platforms. It may work for IMS files exported from other platforms, but we have no way of knowing.
Note : When using this tool we have often found that some pages/images go missing which should have been converted, in every case so far this has been traced to the WebCT IMS export missing out these files, rather than a problem in our tool, the solution is to copy these files manually from the webct files directory to the relevant moodle directory.
Click here to download the converter tool - Please read the README.txt and gpl.txt files in this distribution before trying to do anything.
API For Moodle 1.2 - 1.6
This download contains files which add a simple URL based API to Moodle allowing external programmes to communicate with moodle for the purposes of adding users, deleting users and manipulating the courses for which users are registered for. At the present time the API is undocumented, but we hope to provide documentation as some point in the future when time permits. For the time being a copy of the Java class which we use to link to this API is provided, which should help in deciphering the functions of the API.
Download the Moodle API :
Course Content Search
This is mostly based outside of Moodle and is written in Java using the Apache Lucene search engine backend. The search function itself is an integral part of our main website rather than moodle, moodle itself simply has a few lightweight modifications to allow it to tie into this search function.
Integrated Login/Logout
In order to enable our users to login to both the autotrain website and moodle simultaneously we have written a modified moodle login page which accepts data from the autotrain login form and then transparently redirects you back to the autotrain login system and welcome page after moodle has set up its own session and cookies. We haven't made any changes to the way moodle actually works, but if you really want to see the code (which was modified from the original moodle login pages), then contact us.