How-To Tutorials - Web Development

Celtx: Open Source Screenwriting Beginner's Guide Write and market Hollywood-perfect movie scripts the free way!      If you just write scripts, you won't need the features in this article. However, Indie (independent) producers, folks actually making movies, putting together audio visual shows, or creating documentaries will find these tools of immense value and here we look at visualizing all this good stuff (pun, as ever, intended). Sketching Celtx's Sketch Tool allows us to easily visualize ideas and shot setups by adding our drawings of them to projects. Sketches can be separate items in the Project Library (or in folders within the library) or added to a project's Storyboard (more on that in the next section of this article). The Sketch Tool comes with pre-loaded icons for people, cameras, and lights, which we can drag and drop into our sketches, making them look more polished. The icons are SVG images (Scalable Vector Graphics), which allow us to make them as large as we like without losing any quality in the image. The http://celtx.com site makes additional icons available (Art Packs) at low costs (example: $2.99 for 23 icons). Also provided in the Sketch tool are tools for drawing lines, arrows, shapes, and for adding text labels. Just to avoid confusion, let me tell you that there is nothing like pens or erasers or other free drawing features. We'll use various drag-and-drop icons and any of us, artistic talent or not, can turn out very professional-looking storyboards in no time at all. Celtx Projects are containers which hold items such as scripts, index cards, reports, schedules, storyboards, prop lists, and more including sketches. Time for action - starting a new sketch We have two ways of creating a new Sketch, which are as follows: First, open a project (new or already in progress) and look in the Project Library in the upper-left quadrant of the Celtx screen. Sketch is included by default, as shown in the following screenshot: The following steps show the second method for creating a new sketch: Click on File at the very upper-left of the Celtx main window On the drop-down menu, choose Add Item... Click on Sketch and then click on OK, as shown in the following screenshot: What just happened? The new Sketch is added to the Project Library window. If one was already there (likely since it is by default), you now have two with the same name. No problem; simply right-click on one of them, choose Rename, and change its name. We can also delete or duplicate a Sketch this way. To open the main Sketch Tool window from anywhere in a Celtx project, double-click on the name of the Sketch in the Project Library. In the case of a new Sketch created through the Add Item dialog box, as shown in the preceding section, it will already be open and ready for use. That is, the main window covering most of the center of the Celtx screen is where we sketch. Double-clicking on Screenplay or any other item in the Project Library window navigates us to that item and away from our Sketch. It is saved automatically. The following screenshot shows how the Sketch Tool looks when opened: Sketch Tool toolbar Along the top of the middle window (the Sketch Tool window), we have a toolbar. In the preceding screenshot, most of these tools are grayed out. They become fully visible when conditions are met for their use. Let's take a tour. The following screenshot shows the sketch toolbar in its entirety: Now, let's explore these tools individually and see what they do. In addition to the tool bar (shown in the preceding screenshot), I'll include an image of each individual tool as well: Select tool: The first tool from the left is for selecting items in the sketch. There's nothing to select yet, so let's click on the second tool from the left. The select tool is shown in the following screenshot: The diagonal line: It is the second tool from the left and it draws a line. Move the cursor (now a cross) to the point where the line begins, hold down the left mouse button, and drag out the line, releasing the mouse button at its ending point. The diagonal line is shown in the following screenshot: Line tool: Click on the first tool above. The mouse cursor becomes a hollow arrow on a PC but remains a black arrow on the Mac. Select the line we drew by clicking on it (a little hard for a line) or holding down the left mouse button and drawing a box all the way around the line (easier). When the mouse button is released, we know the line is selected because it has a dotted blue line around it and two small gray circles or "handles" at either end. Once the item is selected, just hold down the left mouse button and it can be moved anywhere in the Sketch Tool window.Select either of the handles by moving the cursor arrow over it and pressing the left mouse button. We can now move that end of the line all over the place and it stays wherever the button is released; it's the same for the other end of the line. While the line is selected, just hit the Delete key to erase it. This also works in the same way for all the other elements. Arrow Tool: The third tool from the left (the diagonal arrow) works exactly like the line tool, except there's an arrowhead on one end. It's a useful drawing tool for pointing to something in our diagrams or using as a spear if it's that kind of movie, eh? The arrow tool is shown in the following screenshot: Box and Circle Tools: The fourth tool (the box) draws a box or rectangle and the fifth (the circle) a circle or oval. Clicking on the select tool (the first tool on the left) and using its cursor to click inside of a square or circle selects it. There are two little gray circles which allow us to manipulate the figure just as we did with the line above. The box tool is shown in the following screenshot: And the circle tool is shown in the following screenshot: Text Tool: Suppose we want to label a line, arrow, box, or circle, we can use the sixth tool, that is, the little letter "A", which is shown in the following screenshot: Draw a box and click on the A. The mouse cursor is now an "I-beam". Click in the box. A mini-dialog box appears, as shown in the following screenshot: This Edit Text box allows the selection of the font, size, bold, italic, and provides a place to type in the label, such as the stirring This is a box. Click on OK and the label is in the box, as shown in the following screenshot: If we need to edit an existing label, click on the select tool, double-click on the text, the Edit Text mini-dialog box comes up, and you can edit the text. Keeping the labeled box as an example, we're ready to visit the next two tools, namely, the empty circle and his brother the solid circle, both of which are grayed out at the moment. Let's wake them up. Stroke and Fill Tools: Click on the select tool and then click inside the box. These two tools turn blue and allow us access to them. These are shown in the following screenshot: The empty circle controls the color of the stroke (that's the outline of the item, such as our box) and the solid circle, the fill (the inside color of the item). Note that there is a small arrow on the right side of each circle. Click on the one next to the solid (fill) circle. A color selection box drops down; choose a color by clicking on it. The box now has that color inside it as a fill, as shown in the following screenshot: If you want to change the stroke and/or fill colors, just click on the stroke or fill tool to drop-down the selection box again. Moving on, add another box (or circle, whatever) and move it. Use the select tool, hold down the Shift key, click on the new box, and move it over the original box. Layer Tools: Okay, we now have one item on top of another. Sometimes that's inconvenient in a scene diagram and we need to reverse the order (move one or more items up a layer or more). With the top box selected, look at the toolbar. The next four icons to the right of the stroke and fill circles are now "lit up" (no longer grayed out). The layer tools are shown in the following screenshot: These are, in the order, lower to bottom, lower, raise, and raise to top. In other words, the selected box would be lowered to the bottom-most layer, lowered one layer, raised one layer, or jumped all the way to the top-most layer. Group and Ungroup: Now, to save a few million electrons, let's use the same two boxes again. Select the one on top, hold down the Shift key, and both boxes are now selected. We can move them together, for example. However, note that the next icon to the right is now no longer gray (it's now two blue boxes, one over the other and four smaller black ones). This is the group tool, which is shown in the following screenshot: Clicking on it groups or bonds the selected items together. This, of course, lights up the next icon on the toolbar, the (wait for it) ungroup tool, which restores independence to grouped items. Undo and Redo Tools: The next two toolbar icons, the curved arrows, are undo and redo tools. They reverse an action to the previous state or restore an item to its next state (if there is one, that is, "undo" and "redo"). These tools are shown in the following screenshot: Cut, Copy, and Paste Tools: The last three tools on the Sketch Tool window toolbar are the cut, copy, and paste tools, as shown in the following screenshot: Cutting removes an item but retains it on the clipboard, copying leaves the item and also puts a copy of it on the clipboard, while paste puts the item from the clipboard back into the sketch. Now, we come to the fun part, icons! As in "yes, icon do a professional-looking sketch." (Sorry, couldn't resist.) Icons for a professional look Celtx provides icons, giving our sketches a polished professional look (neat, artistic, follows industry entertainment conventions) while requiring little or no artistic ability. The Palettes windows, found on the right side of the main Sketch Tool window, list available icons. The default installation of Celtx includes a very limited number of icons, one camera, two kinds of lights, and a top-down view of a man and a woman. Celtx, of course, is open source software and thus free (a price I can afford). However, one of the ways in which its sponsoring developer, a Canadian company, Greyfirst Corp. in St. John's, Newfoundland, makes money is by selling add-ons to the program, one type being additional icons in the form of Art Packs. In the following screenshot, if we click on the + Get Art Packs link, a webpage opens where one can order Art Packs and other add-ons at quite reasonable prices: Now, to use an icon in a sketch, let's start with the camera. Open a new sketch by doubleclicking on Sketch in the Project Library window or Add Item from the main File menu. In the Palettes window, move the mouse cursor over Camera and hold down the left mouse button while dragging the camera icon into the main Sketch Tool window. It looks like the following screenshot: Manipulating icons: When any icon is dragged into the main window of the Sketch Tool (and anytime that icon is selected by clicking on it with the select tool cursor described earlier) it has a dotted circle around it (as shown in the preceding screenshot) and two small solid circles (violet on top, olive below). Clicking on the violet circle and holding down the left mouse button while dragging allows rotation of the icon. Releasing the button stops rotation and leaves the icon in that orientation. Clicking on the olive circle (the lower one) and holding down the left mouse button and dragging allow resizing the icon, either larger or smaller. As these icons, like the lines, arrows, boxes, and circles we discussed earlier in this article are also SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics), we can have them as large as desired with no pixilation or other distortion. Using the Sketch Tool toolbar and the supplied icons, we can rapidly and easily draw professional looking diagrams like the scene shown in the following screenshot, which shows two lights, the camera, the talent, arrows showing their movement in the scene, and the props: Again, additional icons may be purchased from the http://celtx.com website. For example, the following screenshot shows the twenty-three icons available in Art Pack 1: Saving a finished Sketch Now is a good time for us to take a moment and discuss the limitations of the Sketch Tool. This feature provides a fast way of whipping up a scene diagram from inside a Celtx project. It does not replace an outside drawing program nor give us the functionality of something like Adobe Illustrator, but it is quite powerful and very handy. By the way, we can use external media files in Celtx and we'll do just that in both of the remaining sections of this article. Another limitation concerns saving sketches. There's no way of exporting the sketch as an external image such as .jpg or .bmp. In fact, even saving within the Celtx project is automated. Do the following to see what I mean: In a Celtx project, double-click on Sketch in the Project Library to start a sketch. Draw something. Double-click on Screenplay. Then double-click on Sketch. The drawing is still there. Save the Celtx project, exit, and open it again. Double-click on Sketch. Drawing's still there! We can even use Add Item from the File menu (a shortcut is the little plus symbol beneath the Project Library title) and add another Sketch (same name) to the Project Library and even draw a new sketch in it. Of course, having different drawings with the same name is hardly utilitarian, so here's how we really save a sketch.

  Joomla! 1.6 First Look A concise guide to everything that's new in Joomla! 1.6. Anyone who's used to working with the previous versions of Joomla! knows the old section—category—article drill. Articles had to be part of a category and categories had to be part of a section. There were no workarounds for this rigid three-level content organization scheme. Sometimes, this required Joomla! users to adapt their content to the system's limitations (or extend Joomla!'s functionality by using more powerful content management extensions, so-called Content Construction Kits or CCKs). In Joomla! 1.6, the rigid old system has finally been replaced. Sections have gone; there are now only categories, and any category can hold as many levels of subcategories as you need. In the backend, instead of both a Section Manager and a Category Manager, you'll now find only a Category Manager. You can forget the concept of sections altogether; in Joomla!! 1.6 there's no need for them anymore, as they're no longer needed as 'containers' to hold categories. Improvement #1: categories can now be one level deep Sometimes, you'll want to organize articles in just one category. Let's say you want to add a few articles about your organization: who you are, where to reach you, and so on. You don't need any subcategories. You'd need a structure like this: In Joomla! 1.5, this simple setup of a "sectionless" category holding articles wasn't possible. You'd have to organize content in sections and categories—which implied that any group of articles would be stored two levels deep, even if you didn't need this. The only alternative was not to organize content, using uncategorized articles. In Joomla! 1.6, you can put content in just one category if you want to. Just go to Content | Category Manager | Add New Category to create a new category. In the Parent drop down box, select No parent: As this category has "No parent", it becomes a top-level or "parent" category. It's as simple as that; now you can do something that wasn't possible in Joomla! 1.5, by assigning articles directly to this category. Improvement #2: creating multiple category levels Joomla!'s old section—category—article approach didn't allow you to create categories within categories ( "nested categories"). However, on content-rich sites, you might need more than two levels of content organization and use a few subcategories. Here's an example from a site featuring product reviews. It uses several levels to organize the main category of "reviews" in subcategories of product types, brands, and models: A great advantage of being able to create such a structure is that it allows for very specific searches (that is, within categories) and multiple ways of navigation. Another example is if you are creating a catalog that you want to be searchable with multiple filters such as manufacturer, price, general item type, or a specific product name. Creating a set of 'nested' categories Let's find out how you can quickly set up a few nested categories like the ones shown in the illustration above: Go to Content | Category Manager | Add New Category. In the Title field, enter Reviews. In the Parent field, make sure that the default option No parent is selected. The screen should look like this: Click on Save & New. A message appears to confirm your action: Category successfully saved. At the same time, all the fields in the Add New Category are emptied. To create a subcategory, enter the subcategory name Cameras in the Title field. In the Parent drop-down box, select Reviews: Click on Save & New to store the subcategory. Repeat the previous three steps to create more subcategories. For each new category, first enter a title, then select the appropriate parent category and save it by clicking on Save & New. When you're done with creating subcategories, click on Save & Close to view the results in the Category Manager. In the example below, the Cameras category is parent to a subcategory Compact Cameras. The Compact Cameras category is parent to a subcategory called Canon. If you've followed the above example, you'll find the following set of categories in the Category Manager. They are displayed as shown below: The Reviews name isn't indented, as it is a top-level category. Cameras, Compact Cameras, and Canon are displayed indented as they are subcategories. When you create articles, you can now assign them to the new categories. The same category hierarchy as you've just seen in the Category Manager is displayed in the Category drop-down box: Using nested categories in the sample data You've just set up a few categories and subcategories yourself. On a complex site, you can have a far more complex structure. Don't worry, I won't ask you to create dozens of nested categories right now—but it's a good idea to learn from the example set by the Joomla! Developers. Let's have a look at the categories and articles that come with Joomla! when it is installed with sample data. The way things are organized there will give you some idea of how you can deploy nested categories and get the most out of the new system. Exploring the sample data On the frontend, click on the Sample sites link in the This Site menu. On the Sample Sites page, a new menu appears. This menu gives access to both sample sites—Australian Parks and Fruit Shop: Have a look around at both example sites. They appear to be separate websites, but they're not. Here the Joomla! developers have cunningly deployed the possibilities of the new category system and have organized all content for the three sites (the main site and two example sites) within one big website. To find out how this is done, let's have a look at the categories in the backend: Go to Content | Category Manager to see how the sample content is organized. The screenshot below shows an overview: As you can see in the screenshot above, there's one top-level category, Sample Data-Articles. All other articles are contained in the subcategories of this main level category. Apart from the top level category, there are three main categories: The Joomla! category. It has three sublevels. The Park Site category. It has two sublevels. The Fruit Shop category. It has one sublevel. Finally, there's a group of articles that's not in any category; it's a bunch of leftovers all marked as Uncategorized. How can different categories look like different sites? As you click through the example sites, not only the content changes; the menu links to each main category (such as the Parks and Fruit Shop category) have specific templates assigned to them. This way, on the frontend, the look-and-feel of the different main article categories are totally different, whereas in the backend, they're just part of one big site. Applying templates to categories can give visitors the impression of exploring a separate set of websites. Although there's no limit to the number of levels in the category hierarchy, even in this rather complex set of sample site articles, categories don't go further than four levels deep. It is possible to make more subcategories, but keep in mind that this means that your content will be stored 'deeper' in the hierarchy, possibly making it more difficult for visitors (and search engines) to find it. One benefit of placing interrelated content under its own main level category is that you can easily unpublish, delete, or archive any content dealing with a specific subject by unpublishing, deleting, or archiving this main level category. That's why the Joomla! developers have chosen to use one top-level category for all sample data. By unpublishing the top level category (Sample Data-Articles), you can unpublish all of the example content in one go. New category settings: notes and metadata When entering or editing a new category, the New Category or Edit Category screen now offer you an area to type notes about the purpose of the category or related items, as well as a place to add keywords and a description (metadata). The Note field (found in the Basic Options section) can be useful to share some extra information about the category with other backend users. For example, you can enter a short explanation about this category ('subcategory of ...'): Adding category metadata In Joomla! 1.5, there was no way to separately enter metadata for category pages. Now, you can enter specific Meta Description and Meta Keywords in the Metadata Options section when creating or editing a category. Another new item in the Basic Options of a category is the Alternative Layout select box. Alternative layouts are an advanced new feature that enable you to select a customized layout for the current category, provided the selected template (or a third-party component) provides these extra layout options. A template can contain so-called template override files, allowing for customized layouts that replace Joomla!'s default views. Using the Alternative Layout select box, you can now select the template override you want to activate for this particular item. To find out more about this feature, have a look at the "Introduction to Alternative Layouts in Version 1.6" document on the Joomlacode site. You'll find it at http://downloads.joomlacode.org/trackeritem/5/8/6/58619/introtoaltlayoutsinversion1-6v2.pdf. Fresh ways to display category contents on the frontend Joomla! 1.6 provides several additional methods to display category contents. They replace the four classic layouts of Category List, Category Blog, Section List, and Section Blog. When creating a new menu link pointing to a category, you are now presented with a slightly different set of Menu Item Types: These are the category views are available: List All Categories is a new view, described below Category Blog was previously called Category Blog Layout Category List was previously called Category List Layout The Blog and List views are basically the same as they've always been. However, these display types now offer new settings that provide more control over the look and feel of the resulting pages. Along with the new List All Categories menu item type, there are also a few new module types that provide you with new ways to display links to categories and their article contents. Let's have a closer look at the new category views. New category view # 1: List All Categories The new category system rationalizes the organization of content, even in large or complex websites. One advantage of this is that you can more easily give visitors (and search engines!) access to all that well-structured content, just by adding one menu link to a main level category. This will allow visitors to easily drill down the different layers (the category levels) of the site structure. To achieve this, the new List All Categories menu link type allows you to display categories as well as their subcategory contents. You can see an example of this menu organization if you select the Site Map link on the This Site menu in the frontend of the sample Joomla! 1.6 content. As we've previously seen, the sample data that comes with Joomla! 1.6 is organized in a structured way. The Site Map link uses the List All Categories menu item type to show all levels in the category hierarchy.  

It's hard to find a web application that does not have a single table that presents the user with some data. Building these DataTables, although not very difficult, can be a daunting task because each of these tables must often support paging, sorting, filtering, and so on. Wicket ships with a very powerful component called the DataTable that makes implementing all these features simple and elegant. Because Wicket is component-oriented, once implemented, these features can be easily reused across multiple DataTable deployments. In this article, we will see how to implement the features mentioned previously using the DataTable and the infrastructure it provides. Sorting A common requirement, when displaying tabular data, is to allow users to sort it by clicking the table headers. Click a header once and the data is sorted on that column in ascending order; click it again, and the data is sorted in the descending order. In this recipe, we will see how to implement such a behavior when displaying data using a DataTable component. We will build a simple table that will look much like a phone book and will allow the sorting of data on the name and e-mail columns: Getting ready Begin by creating a page that will list contacts using the DataTable, but without sorting: Create Contact bean: Contact.java public class Contact implements Serializable { public String name, email, phone; // getters, setters, constructors2. Create the page that will list the contacts: HomePage.html <html> <body> <table wicket_id="contacts" class="contacts"></table> </body> </html> HomePage.java public class HomePage extends WebPage { private static List<Contact> contacts = Arrays.asList( new Contact("Homer Simpson", "[email protected]", "555-1211"), new Contact("Charles Burns", "[email protected]", "555-5322"), new Contact("Ned Flanders", "[email protected]", "555-9732")); public HomePage(final PageParameters parameters) { // sample code adds a DataTable and a data providert hat uses the contacts list created above } } How to do it... Enable sorting by letting DataTable columns know they can be sorted by using a constructor that takes the sort data parameter: HomePage.java List<IColumn<Contact>> columns = new ArrayList<IColumn<Contact>>(); columns.add(new PropertyColumn<Contact>(Model.of("Name"), "name","name")); columns.add(new PropertyColumn<Contact>(Model.of("Email"), "email", "email")); columns.add(new PropertyColumn<Contact>(Model.of("Phone"), "phone")); Implement sorting by modifying the data provider: private static class ContactsProvider extends SortableDataProvider<Contact> { public ContactsProvider() { setSort("name", true); } public Iterator<? extends Contact> iterator(int first, int count) { List<Contact> data = new ArrayList<Contact>(contacts); Collections.sort(data, new Comparator<Contact>() { public int compare(Contact o1, Contact o2) { int dir = getSort().isAscending() ? 1 : -1; if ("name".equals(getSort().getProperty())) { return dir * (o1.name.compareTo(o2.name)); } else { return dir * (o1.email.compareTo(o2.email)); } } }); return data.subList(first, Math.min(first + count, data.size())).iterator(); } public int size() { return contacts.size(); } public IModel<Contact> model(Contact object) { return Model.of(object); } } How it works... DataTable supports sorting out of the box. Any column with the IColumn#getSortProperty() method that returns a non-null value is treated as a sortable column and Wicket makes its header clickable. When a header of a sortable column is clicked Wicket will pass the value of IColumn#getSortProperty to the data provider which should use this value to sort the data. In order to know about the sorting information the data provider must implement the ISortableDataProvider interface; Wicket provides the default SortableDataProvider implementation which is commonly used to implement sort-capable data providers. DataTable will take care of details such as multiple clicks to the same column resulting in change of sorting direction, so on. Let's examine how to implement sorting in practice. In step 1 and 2, we have implemented a basic DataTable that cannot yet sort data. Even though the data provider we have implemented already extends a SortableDataProvider, it does not yet take advantage of any sort information that may be passed to it. We start building support for sorting by enabling it on the columns, in our case the name and the email columns: List<IColumn<Contact>> columns = new ArrayList<IColumn<Contact>>(); columns.add(new PropertyColumn<Contact>(Model.of("Name"), "name", "name")); columns.add(new PropertyColumn<Contact>(Model.of("Email"), "email", "email")); columns.add(new PropertyColumn<Contact>(Model.of("Phone"), "phone")); We enable sorting on the columns by using the three-argument constructor of the PropertyColumn, with the second argument being the "sort data". Whenever a DataTable column with sorting enabled is clicked, the data provider will be given the value of the "sort data". In the example, only the name and e-mail columns have sorting enabled with the sort data defined as a string with values "name" and "e-mail" respectively. Now, let's implement sorting by making our data provider implementation sort-aware. Since our data provider already extends a provider that implements ISortableDataProvider we only need to take advantage of the sort information: public Iterator<? extends Contact> iterator(int first, int count) { List<Contact> data = new ArrayList<Contact>(contacts); Collections.sort(data, new Comparator<Contact>() { public int compare(Contact o1, Contact o2) { int dir = getSort().isAscending() ? 1 : -1; if ("name".equals(getSort().getProperty())) { return dir * (o1.name.compareTo(o2.name)); } else { return dir * (o1.email.compareTo(o2.email)); } } }); return data.subList(first, Math.min(first + count, data.size())).iterator(); } First we copy the data into a new list which we can sort as needed and then we sort based on the sort data and direction provided. The value returned by getSort().getProperty() is the same sort data values we have defined previously when creating columns. The only remaining task is to define a default sort which will be used when the table is rendered before the user clicks any header of a sortable column. We do this in the constructor of our data provider: public ContactsProvider() { setSort("name", true); } There's more... DataTable gives us a lot out of the box; in this section we see how to add some usability enhancements. Adding sort direction indicators via CSS DataTable is nice enough to decorate sortable <th> elements with sort-related CSS classes out of the box. This makes it trivial to implement sort direction indicators as shown in the following screenshot: A possible CSS style definition can look like this: table tr th { background-position: right; background-repeat:no-repeat; } table tr th.wicket_orderDown { background-image: url(images/arrow_down.png); } table tr th.wicket_orderUp { background-image: url(images/arrow_up.png); } table tr th.wicket_orderNone { background-image: url(images/arrow_off.png);

Moodle is a really useful tool for helping teachers to monitor the progress of their students. As any teacher knows, this can be a challenge, so having everything in one place is very useful. We'll look at how you can monitor progress with an example. Checking usage and completion of tasks For you to be able to help your users learn, it goes without saying that they have to complete the tasks you set! Quite a common question is "how do I know if my users are looking at the content I make for them?" There are a variety of ways to monitor this, which vary depending on whether you are looking at a resource or an activity. Tracking usage of course materials Quite often you might set your students a task to go on to your Moodle course and read a resource that you have uploaded or follow a link to another website. While you can't know for sure that they have read the material, it is possible to check that they have displayed it on their screen. To check if users had viewed a resource, we have completion tracking. To use this feature, your administrator must enable it for your whole site and you need to turn it on in the student progress section of the course settings. This means that now you can easily see a list of users who have looked at the resource. On the pupil view, there are boxes next to items that require completion. If a teacher has specified certain conditions that need to be met, the box will automatically fill with a tick once they have been met. Users can also use this to manually track their progress towards completion if there are no criteria set for a particular task by ticking a shaded box themselves. This is shown in the following screenshot: Preparation for course completion reports The course completion report will show you which activities or resources your learners have used. To demonstrate this first you need to change some of the settings on your resources and activities, and ask your administrator to enable it in the site settings. Completion settings for resources Let's go back to a resource we uploaded in the first topic "Manufacture of magnesium sulfate" and edit it. Click on Turn editing on, which has the icon of the hand holding the pen. When the updating file dialog comes up, scroll right down to the bottom where it says Activity completion. Here you have a number of settings, as shown in the next screenshot: We're going to use the setting Show activity as complete when conditions are met. If you're happy letting your users decide to declare when they have completed an activity, you can use the setting Students can manually mark the activity as completed. This would be useful for a self review, towards pupils building a portfolio, or just to get them to take more responsibility over their learning. Once you've done this choose the conditions that need to be met. As this is a resource check the box next to Require view. These conditions vary depending on the nature of the activity. If you want to you can set a date when you expect the activity to be completed. This is just to help organize your completion report and is not shared with the users. Completion settings for activities Different activities have their own settings that you can set to decide when an activity is completed by your users. We'll go through each of these below. Forum activity completion settings You can set up activity completion for forums. In the introduction to this forum, our learners were asked to answer the most recent unanswered question and then post a question of their own. Let's use activity completion to make sure that they do this. In the same way, go to update the forum and scroll down to the activity completion settings at the bottom. You'll notice that there are a lot more options than for a resource. The activity completion settings that we'll choose are Required discussions and Require replies. Both of these will be set to one. This means that your students will need to start at least one discussion and provide at least one reply. Don't forget to set the completion tracking setting in the top drop-down box. This is what the settings will look like: Quiz activity completion For quizzes (assignments and lessons), there are two options for activity completion. You can either require your users to view the quiz or require a grade. Let's go back to the motion quiz we set up and let that require students to receive a grade to complete this activity. Here are the settings: Chat activity completion For a chat activity, the only completion option is for users to manually check the boxes completed. Once you've gone through and set the activity completion settings you will be able to see which of your activities your users have completed. Completion tracking for your whole course Now that you have set up your activities and resources to be tracked, you need to define at a course level, which activities need to be finished for course completion. From the settings block on the left-hand side, click on the link Completion tracking. This is where you decide on the criteria for course completion. We want our users to complete all of the activities chosen, so in the first box choose All for the aggregation method. If there are prerequisites for your course, you can set them here. In the activities completed box, check all of the activities you want your users to complete and specify the completion dates, if any, and passing grades. All the settings can be changed to a later date, if you wish. Course completion reports You can now set up the course completion reports. The link can be found in the navigation block on the left-hand side: Once you click on the course completion reports link, you should see something like the following: The grayed out boxes with ticks are for activities that users can manually choose completion for. So as you can see, it would be quite easy to identify which users haven't completed particular tasks. From here, you can click a user's name and send them a reminder via a message. You can also export this data if you wish. Course reports There are three different types of course reports—activity report, view course logs, and participation report. You can use them to monitor your users in slightly different ways. Activity report For the activity report, you can see a simple overview of the number of views for each activity. This could be useful if you want to see if one activity is more popular than another or if an activity is not being viewed a lot. View course logs This report shows detailed usage across the whole course. Now that we are using completion reports, you would only need to use this type of log if you wanted to check when a particular user accessed a task. Participation report This report gives you a customizable overview for each activity listed by a user. You could use this type of report to see if the users have viewed or posted to an activity or resource and then send messages directly to multiple users.

  Moodle 1.9 Testing and Assessment Develop and evaluate quizzes and tests using Moodle modules         Read more about this book       (For more resources on Moodle, see here.) Workshop is an important part of our look at testing and assessing with Moodle. Here we will look at Workshop, which offers a way to interact and assess students through their submitted work as well as offering the option of self-assessment, peer assessment, and teacher assessment. The first thing we need to do is name the Workshop and give it a description. We will call ours Paragraph Writing Workshop. In the description, we will write a brief summary of what is expected. We are going to test our students on their ability to write a paragraph on a topic of their choosing, with the requirements being that they have a main idea, supporting sentences, and a conclusion. Now, we need to choose our settings. For our first Workshop, we're going to leave most of the settings at the default. The first settings we are going to change are the Grade for Submission and Grade for Assessments. We want our Workshop to be worth 100 points, with each aspect, the teacher and peer assessment, of the Workshop making up half the grade, 50 percent and 50 percent respectively. The other setting we're going to change is Number of Comments, Assessment Elements, Grade Bands, which we will move from one to three. We are moving it to three because our paragraph has three elements we are going to evaluate: main idea, support, and conclusion. Once we've made that change in the Workshop, we will save it. The first thing we see after saving the Workshop is Editing Assessment Elements, since we decided to stay with the default Accumulative grading technique. We have three Elements to complete here, and for Element 1 we are going to enter 'Has a main idea.' For Element 2 we are going to enter 'Has supporting sentences.' For Element 3 we are going to enter 'Has a conclusion.' For each Type of Scale menu, we are going to leave it set to the two point Yes or No scale, since we are simply going to be checking whether or not the paragraph has met the requirements set. We are also going to leave the Element Weight set at 1, since we want each Element to be equal. Once we have entered everything and confirmed the spelling, we click on Save changes. Once the page has been saved, we are taken to the Paragraph Writing Workshop page. Workshop page—Teacher's view This page has all the information you need regarding the Workshop. It has three sections, which give us all the details about the Workshop. The top section is shown in the next screenshot: Here, we have the information about the phase the Workshop is in. The phases are Set up Assignment, Allow Submissions, Allow Submissions and Assessments, Allow Assessments, Calculation of Final Grades, and Show Final Grades. The phases let us know where we are in the Workshop. As you can see, we are in the Allow Submissions and Assessments phase. We also see the start and end of submissions and assessments. The final information contained in this section is the Maximum grade. Here, we see that our maximum grade is 100. This is because we changed the settings from default and the Grade for Assessments and Grade for Submission were both set to 50. Next to the Maximum grade, we see the Specimen Assessment Form link. Clicking on this link will bring us to a sample of the Assessment Sheet we created. This is shown in the next screenshot: I have only shown the first Element here, and the others follow the same pattern. At the top we see the date and time. Under that, we see the criterion we are assessing in the submitted work. Following this, we see the Grade. We have chosen to use a simple 2 Point Scale, Yes or No, so we are presented with just that. Under this we see an area for comments regarding Element 1. Underneath all of the Elements of the Assessment sheet, there is a box for general feedback or comments, which is not graded. At the very bottom of the page, you will see a continue button. Clicking on this will bring you back to the Workshop page. The final thing to mention here is that next to the Specimen Assessment Form link, there is an Edit icon. This can come in handy if you missed something or want to change something in one of the Elements. The second section of the Workshop page is shown here: (Move the mouse over the image to enlarge.) In the previous screenshot, we see the Show Workshop Description link. Clicking on this link will show the description entered when the Workshop was created. Once review of the Workshop description is done, click on the continue button to return to the Workshop page. Under this, we see information about submitted assignments. There are five columns, First Name / Surname, Submission Title, Date, Teacher Assessment, and Total Grade. Under this, in the small letters, we see information about how to interpret the grades as well as the total possible points. Each of these columns will display the appropriate information, and we will look at this again once we submit an assignment. The final section we see on the Workshop page is called Grading Grade Analysis and is shown in the next screenshot: We can see the Count, Mean, Standard Deviation, Maximum, and Minimum in the previous screenshot. Again, we have not submitted any work or assessed anything yet, so there is nothing here. However, once scores are entered into the Workshop, these numbers will be automatically calculated and updated. Now, all we need to do is have our students log into Moodle and they will see the Workshop and they will be able to enter and begin using it. Workshop page—Student's view When the students enter the Workshop, they will see a page that looks a bit different than the one we have just looked at. This is shown in the next screenshot: As you can see, at the top of the page, they see the same thing as the instructor. The student can see the Current phase, which has now moved to the third phase, Allow Submissions and Assessments. It moved to the third Phase because we set the opening for Submissions and Assessments at the same time. We would have seen the second Phase if we had set the Submission and Assessment times to be different. Students will also see the Workshop submission's and assessment's open and close dates and the Maximum grade possible for the Workshop. They are also able to preview the Assessment Form that will be used. This preview is identical to the one the instructor sees. Under this, the students will see the description of the Workshop with the instructions on how they should complete it. Under the Workshop description, we see the Assignment Submission Form. Here is where the students enter their work. There are three things that are done with this form. First, the student will need to create a title in the Submission Title box. Submission Titles Since Workshop is mostly about peer assessments, you may want to control the way titles are handled. While we can hide the student's name from the peer assessor, the title will always be visible. You may want to have students to use an anonymous system, numbers or some other form of code, so that there is no bias in grading. The second thing the students will do is enter their work in the Submission rich text editor. If there were any attachments included as part of the assignment, they would be seen directly below the textbox. When the students have finished with their submission, they click on the Submit Assignment button and the work will be uploaded to a new area called Your Submissions. What a student sees after clicking on the Submit Assignment button is shown in the next screenshot: This newly created section has four pieces of information for the student to see. The first is the Submission Title. Clicking on the title link will bring the student to a new page where they can view their work. The second section is the Action link. If the student is not satisfied with their work, they have the option to either edit or delete it. Clicking on the Edit link will bring the student to the submission screen where they can change whatever they would like, including uploading additional files, should this feature be enabled. The Delete link will permanently erase the file, but as a safeguard, Workshop will offer the student one chance to change their mind before completely erasing the file. The third is the column that shows the date the assignment was submitted. If the assignment is edited, the time of the editing will be reflected in the Submitted column. This can cause a problem for instructors if the deadline for submissions is not set properly. For example, say a student submits the work on time and as they are reviewing the work later in the week, they notice a misspelling, which they edit. The submitted time will be changed to reflect the last edit completed. The final column is Assessments. This is where the student can see how many times they have been assessed. We have no assessments yet, but we do now have a newly submitted piece of work, so we will switch back to our Teacher profile and look at the changes that have taken place.  

  IBM Lotus Domino: Classic Web Application Development Techniques A step-by-step guide for web application development and quick tips to enhance applications using Lotus Domino Most of the CSS rules you write for an application relate to design elements on forms and pages. Suggestions and examples in this section just scratch the surface of CSS possibilities. Browse the Web for additional ideas. Here we focus on the mechanics of how elements are styled, rather than on specific recommendations about what looks good, which is largely a matter of taste. Use color effectively Use pleasing, complementary colors. If your organization requires a specific set of colors, then, of course, find out what that palette is and conform to it as much as possible. Color tastes change over the years, primary colors dominating at times and lighter pastels in vogue at others. Here are a few generalities to consider: Use white or very light colors for backgrounds Use stronger colors such as dark red to make important elements stand out Use no more than three or four colors on a form Use black or dark gray text on a light background for lengthy text passages If you have paid little attention to the matter of color in your applications, do some web work on the subject. Once you select a color scheme, provide some samples to your customers for their opinions and suggestions. Style text Typography is a complex topic with a rich history and strong opinions. For web application design purposes, consider using web-safe fonts which are likely to be available on most or all personal computers. If you use a font that is not available to a browser, then text is rendered with a default font. Fonts with serifs are usually considered easier to read on paper, and less so as web page text. Experiment with the following fonts: Bookman Old Style Cambria Garamond Georgia Times New Roman Common fonts without serifs (sans serif) are considered easier to read on the Web. Some examples include: Arial Calibri Helvetica MS Sans Serif Tahoma Trebuchet MS Verdana Mono-spaced fonts are useful when you want text to line up—columns of numbers in a table, perhaps: Courier New Courier Establish a common font style with CSS rules applied to the body type selector or to a main division using a type selector, a class selector, or an ID selector: body { color: #555555; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 8pt; } Style headings and labels If headings and labels are bracketed with HTML heading tags (for example, <h1> or <h2gt;), they can be styled with type selectors: h1 { color: Blue; font-family: Arial; font-size: 18pt; font-weight: bold; } If headings and labels are bracketed with <span> tags, use CSS classes: <span class="highlight1">October News</span> Underline links in text but not in menus When browsers and the Web first appeared in the early 1990's, hyperlinks were a novelty. To distinguish a link from normal text, the convention developed to underscore the text containing the link, and often the link text was colored blue. There is no magic associated with underscoring and making text blue—it was just the convention adopted at the time. Today links in text passages are usually distinguished from adjacent text with color, weight or underscoring. In a menu, however, each item is understood to be a hotspot link. Underscores and blue text are not required. So if you feel like underscoring a link, do so if the link appears within some text, but don't underscore links in menus. At the same time, refrain from highlighting important text with underscoring, which implies that that text is a hyperlink. Use another highlighting technique; italics, bold, or an alternate color work well for this purpose. Style fields Fields can be styled with CSS either with the Style attribute in Field Properties or with CSS rules. The key to understanding how CSS rules can be applied to fields is to understand that fields are translated to the Web using <input> tags. Here is how a simple text field translates into HTML: <input name="FirstName" value=""> Here is how a radio button field translates: <input name="%%Surrogate_Gender" type="hidden" value="1"> <label><input type="radio" name="Gender" value="M">M</label><br> <label><input type="radio" name="Gender" value="F">F</label><br> CSS rules can be defined for the <input> tag, an ID, or a class. For example, assume that a CSS class named requiredtext is defined. If that class name is entered in the Class attribute of Field Properties, the resulting HTML might look like this: <input name="FirstName" value="" class="requiredtext"> CSS style rules coded for the requiredtext class are applied to the field. Highlight required fields Required fields are validated, most likely with JavaScript code, so that complete and good data is saved into the database when a document is submitted. If entered values fail validation, the user is presented with a message of some sort that identifies the problem and requests correction. Web forms typically identify which fields are required. Any of several techniques can be used. Required field labels can be styled with a more prominent color or a special marker such as an asterisk or a checkmark can be positioned near the field. Required fields also can be co-located and set apart using the <fieldset> and <legend> tags. If a field value fails validation, it is common practice to provide an error message and then to set the focus into the field; the cursor is positioned in the field to facilitate an immediate correction. As the cursor can be difficult to spot on a busy form, it is also possible to change the background color of the incorrect field as a way of drawing the user's attention to the field. In this illustration, the background color of the field has been changed to yellow: Implementing this technique requires writing a small JavaScript function that changes the background color of the field, and then calling that function when field validation fails.

Getting started with Moodle tests To start with, we need to select a topic or theme for our test. We are going to choose general science, since the subject matter will be easy to incorporate each of the item types we have seen previously. Now that we have an idea of what our topic is going to be, we will get started in the creation of the test. We will be creating all new questions for this test, which will give us the added benefit of a bit more practice in item creation. So, let's get started and work on making our first real test! Let's open our Moodle course, go to the Activity drop-down, and select Create a new Quiz. Once it has been selected, we will be taken to the Quiz creation page and we'll be looking at the General section. The General section Here need to give the test a name that describes what the test is going to cover. Let's call it 'General Science Final Exam' as it describes what we will be doing in the test. The introduction is also important.this is a test students will take and an effective description of what they will be doing is an important point for them. It helps get their minds thinking about the topic at hand, which can help them prepare, and a person who is prepared can usually perform better. For our introduction, we will write the following, 'This test will see how much you learned in our science class this term. The test will cover all the topics we have studied, including, geology, chemistry, biology, and physics. In this test, there are a variety of question types (True/False, Matching, and others). Please look carefully at the sample questions before you move on. If you have any questions during the test, raise your hand. You will have 'x' attempts with the quiz. We have now given the test an effective name and we have given the students a description of what the test will cover. This will be shown in the Info tab to all the students before they take the test, and if we want in the days running up to the test. That's all we need to do in this section. Timing In this section, we need to make some decisions about when we are going to give the test to the students. We will also need to make a decision about how long we will give the students to complete the test. These are important decisions, and we need to make sure we give our students enough time to complete the test. The default Timing section is shown in the next screenshot: We probably know when our final exam will be. So, when we are creating the test, we can set the date that the test will be available to the students and the date it will stop being accessible to them. Because this is our final exam, we only want it to be available for one day, for a specified time period. We will start by clicking on the Disable checkboxes next to Open the Quiz and Close the Quiz dates. This step will enable the date/time drop-down menus and allow us to set them for the test. For us, our test will start on March 20, 2010 at 16:55 p.m. and it will end the same day, one hour later. So we will change the appropriate menus to reflect our needs. If these dates are not set, a student in the course will be able to take the quiz any time after you finish creating it. We will need to give the students time to get in class, settle down, and have their computers ready. However, we also need to make sure the students finish the test in our class, so we have decided to create a time limit of 45 minutes. This means that the test will be open for one hour, and in that one hour time frame, once they start the test, they will have 45 minutes to finish it. To do this, we need to click on the Enable checkbox next to the Time Limit (minutes) textbox. Clicking on this will enable the textbox, and in it we will enter 45. This value will limit the quiz time to 45 minutes, and will show a floating, count-down timer in the test, causing it to auto-submit 45 minutes after it is started. It is good to note that many students get annoyed by the floating timer and its placement on the screen. The other alternative is to have the test proctor have the students submit the quiz at a specified time. Now, we have decided to give a 45 minute time limit on the test, but without any open-ended questions, the test is highly unlikely to take that long. There is also going to be a big difference in the speed at which different students work. The test proctor should explain to the students how much time they should spend on each question and reviewing their answers. Under the Time Limit (minutes) we see the Time delay between first and second attempt and Time delay between later attempts menus. If we are going to offer the test more than once, we can set these, which would force the students to wait until they could try again. The time delays range from 30 minutes to 7 days, and the None setting will not require any waiting between attempts on the quiz. We are going to leave these set to None because this is a final exam and we are only giving it once. Once all the information has been entered into the Timing section, this dialog box is what we have, as shown in the next screenshot: Display Here, we will make some decisions about the way the quiz will look to the students. We will be dividing questions over several pages, which we will use to create divisions in the test. We will also be making decisions about the shuffle questions and shuffle within questions here. Firstly, as the test creators, we should already have a rough idea of how many questions we are going to have on the test. Looking at the Questions Per Page drop-down menu, we have the option of 1 to 50 questions per page. We have decided that we will be displaying six questions per page on the test. Actually, we will only have five questions the students will answer, but we also want to include a description and a sample question for the students to see how the questions look and how to answer them' thus we will have six on each page. We have the option to shuffle questions within pages and within questions. By default, Shuffle Questions is set to No and Shuffle within Questions is set to Yes. We have decided that we want to have our questions shuffled. But wait, we can't because we are using Description questions to give examples, and if we chose shuffle, these examples would not be where they need to be. So, we will leave the Shuffle Questions setting at the default No. However, we do want to shuffle the responses within the question, which will give each student a slightly different test using the same questions and answers. When the display settings are finished, we can see the output shown in the next screenshot: Attempts In this section, we will be setting the number of attempts possible and how further attempts are dealt with. We will also make a decision about the Adaptive Mode. Looking at the Attempts allowed drop-down menu, we have the option to set the number from 1 to 10 or we can set it to Unlimited attempts. For our test, we have already decided to set the value to 1 attempt, so we will select 1 from the drop-down menu. We have the option of setting the Each Attempt Builds on the Last drop-down menu to Yes or No. This feature does nothing now, because we have only set the test to have a single attempt. If we had decided to allow multiple attempts, a Yes setting would have shown the test taker all the previous answers, as if the student were taking the test again, as well as indicating whether he or she were correct or not. If we were giving our students multiple attempts on the test, but we did not want them to see their previous answers, we would set this to No. We are also going to be setting Adaptive mode to No. We do not want our students to be able to immediately see or correct their responses during the test; we want the students to review their answers before submitting anything. However, if we did want the students to check their answers and correct any mistakes during the test, we would set the Attempts Allowed to a number above 1 and the Adaptive Mode to Yes, which would give us the small Submit button where the students would check and correct any mistakes after each question. If multiple attempts are not allowed, the Submit button will be just that, a button to submit your answer. Here is what the Attempts section looks like after we have set our choices: Grades In this section, we will set the way Moodle will score the student. We see three choices in this section, Grading method, Apply penalties, and Decimal digits in grades; however, because we have only selected a single attempt, two of these options will not be used. Grading Method allows us to determine which of the scores we want to give our student after multiple tries. We have four options here: Highest Grade, Average Grade, First Attempt, and Last Attempt. Highest Grade uses the highest grade achieved from any attempt on any individual question. The Average Grade will take the total number of tries and grades and average them. The First Attempt will use the grade from the first attempt and the Last Attempt will use the grade from the final attempt. Since we are only giving one try on our test, this setting has no function and we will leave it set at its default, Highest Grade, because either option would give the same result. Apply penalties is similar to Grading method, in that it does not function because we have turned off Adaptive Mode. If we had set Adaptive Mode to Yes, then this feature would give us the option of applying penalties, which are set in the individual question setup pages. If we were using Adaptive Mode and this option feature set to No, then there would be no penalties for mistakes as in previous attempts. If it were set to Yes, the penalty amount decided on in the question would be subtracted for each incorrect response from the total points available on the question. However, our test is not set to Adaptive Mode, so we will leave it at the default setting, Yes. It is important to note here that no matter how often a student is penalized for an incorrect response, their grade will never go below zero. The Decimal digits in grades shows the final grade the student receives with the number of decimal places selected here. There are four choices available in this setting: 0, 1, 2, and 3. If, for example, the number is set to 1, the student will receive a score calculated to 1 decimal place, and the same follows for 2 and 3. If the number is set to 0, the final score will be rounded. We will set our Decimal digits in grades to 0. After we have finished, the Grades section appears as shown in the next screenshot: Review options This sectopm is where we set when and what our students will see when they look back at the test. There are three categories: Immediately after the attempt; Later, while quiz is still open; and After the quiz is closed. The first category, Immediately after the attempt, will allow students to see whatever feedback we have selected to display immediately after they click on the Submit all and finish button at the end of the test, or Submit, in the case of Adaptive mode. The second category, Later, while quiz is still open, allows students to view the selected review options any time after the test is finished, that is, when no more attempts are left, but before the test closes. Using the After the quiz is closed setting will allow the student to see the review options after the test closes, meaning that students are no longer able to access the test because a close date was set. The After the quiz is closed option is only useful if a time has been set for the test to close, otherwise the review never happens because the test doesn't ever close. Each of these three categories contains the same review options: Responses, Answers, Feedback, General feedback, Scores, and Overall feedback.Here is what these options do: Responses are the student's response to the question and whether he or she were wrong or correct. Answers are the correct response to the question. Feedback is the feedback you enter based on the answer the student gives. This feedback is different from the General quiz feedback they may receive. General feedback are the comments all students receive, regardless of their answers. Scores are the scores the student received on the questions. Overall feedback are the comments based on the overall grade on the test. We want to give our students all of this information, so they can look it over and find out where they made their mistakes, but we don't want someone who finishes early to have access to all the correct answers. So, we are going to eliminate all feedback on the test until after it closes. That way there is no possibility for the students to see the answers while other students might still be taking the test. To do remove such feedback, we simply unclick all the options available in the categories we don't want. Here is what we have when we are finished: Regardless of the options and categories we select in the Review options, students will always be able to see their overall scores. Looking at our settings, the only thing a student will be able to view immediately after the test is complete is the score. Only after the test closes, will the student be able to see the full range of review material we will be providing. If we had allowed multiple attempts, we would want to have different settings. So, instead of After the quiz is closed, we would want to set our Review options to Immediately after the attempt, because this setting would let the student know where he or she had problems and which areas of the quiz need to be focussed on. One final point here is that even a single checkbox in any of the categories will allow the student to open and view the test, giving the selected review information to the student. This option may or may not be what you want. Be careful to ensure that you have only selected the options and categories you want to use. Security This section is where we can increase quiz security, but it is important to note that these settings will not eliminate the ability of tech-savvy students to cheat. What this section does is provide a few options that make cheating a bit more difficult to do. We have three options in this section: Browser security, Require password, and Require network address. The Browser security drop-down has two options: None and Full screen popup with some JavaScript security. The None option is the default setting and is appropriate for most quizzes. This setting doesn't make any changes in browser security and is the setting you will most likely want to use for in-class quizzes, review quizzes, and others. Using the fullscreen option will create a browser that limits the options for students to fiddle things. This option will open a fullscreen browser window with limited navigation options. In addition to limiting the number of navigation options available, this option will also limit the keyboard and mouse commands available. This option is more appropriate for high-stakes type tests and shouldn't be used unless there is a reason. This setting also requires that JavaScript is used. Browser security is more a safety measure against students pressing the wrong button than preventing cheating, but can help reduce it. The Require password does exactly what you think it would. It requires the students to enter a password before taking the test. To keep all your material secure, I recommend using a password for all quizzes that you create. This setting is especially important if you are offering different versions of the quiz to different classes or different tests in the same class and you want to make sure only those who should be accessing the quiz can. There is also an Unmask checkbox next to the password textbox. This option will show you the password, just in case you forget! Finally, we have the Require network address option, which will only allow those at certain IP Addresses to access the test. These settings can be useful to ensure that only students in the lab or classroom are taking the test. This setting allows you to enter either complete IP Addresses (for example. 123.456.78.9), which require that specific address to begin the test; partial IP Addresses (for example 123.456), which will accept any address as long as it begins with the address prefixes; and what is known as Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) notation, (for example 123.456.78.9/10), which only allows specific subnets. You might want to consult with your network administrator if you want to use this security option. By combining these settings, we can attempt to cut down on cheating and improper access to our test. In our case here, we are only going to use the fullscreen option. We will be giving the test in our classroom, using our computers, so there is no need to turn on the IP Address function or require a password. When we have finished, the Security section appears as shown in the next screenshot:

In this article, we will see the default layout structure of OpenCart. We'll discuss the cascading stylesheet file from it and modify it according to our needs. First of all, we'll use the reset style properties to eliminate cross-browser problems. We will discuss every property here. We'll also see the corresponding effects on our site. Then, we'll do some basic styling for the site. For each change in style, we will see why we did that. Folder structure In our main OpenCart folder, we have the admin and catalog sections. These are two separate subsystems. As the name says, admin has the files and folders for administration operation. Catalog contains the store files and folders. Each admin and catalog section has a separate model, view, and controller. Under this admin and catalog folder, we will see the model, view, and controller folders. You will see different subfolders within those folders. So, let's discuss this MVC structure in the following paragraph. OpenCart is built with the MVC design pattern. So, it has model, view, and controller. A user requests the OpenCart controller to process the request. Then, the controller gets the data using the model and processes the fetched data to show the response with the view file. The following figure shows the above operation of MVC: For theme modification, we will focus only on the View folder of the catalog in this article. It has javascript and theme folders. We place our themes under the theme folder and the necessary JavaScript files in the JavaScript folder. Each theme has an image, stylesheet, and template folder. We will see how we can create a new theme later in this article. Theme file style As we stated earlier, OpenCart uses the MVC design pattern. So, the view files remain separated from the core code. These files are .tpl files. And, they are placed under catalogviewthemedefaulttemplate. These .tpl files are basically HTML files. They have PHP code within them to display the necessary data. OpenCart doesn't use the smarty template engine. Rather, it uses embedded PHP codes that are easy to use. We assign the PHP variables in the controller with necessary data. Then, we call the variable in the .tpl view file. We can also use the global class reference variable. In the controller, we will assign the value like this: $this->data['shop_name'] = 'store'; Here, we assigned store value to the shop_name variable. In the .tpl view file, we will display the value like this: <?php echo $shop_name; ?> Creating a new theme In this recipe, we will see the steps to create a new theme for OpenCart. There are some rules to create OpenCart themes. Getting started Let's get started with the steps to create a new theme with OpenCart. How to do it Following are the steps for creating a new theme for OpenCart: First of all, we need to create a new folder under catalogviewtheme. For example, we will name it shop for this project. Now, we need to copy some files from the default theme folder to our new theme folder. The files are the following: catalogviewthemedefaultstylesheet*.* catalogviewthemedefaultimage*.* catalogviewthemedefaulttemplatecommonheader.tpl We have to edit some values in the header.tpl file for our new theme. We will replace all default keywords with our new theme name shop. Actually, there are six places where we need to replace the new theme name. The lines are the following: <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="catalog/view/theme/shop/stylesheet/stylesheet.css" /> // other lines ... <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="catalog/view/theme/shop/stylesheet/ie6.css" /> //other lines ... <div class="div3"> <a href="<?php echo str_replace('&', '&amp;', $special); ?>" style="background-image: url('catalog/view/theme/shop/image/special.png');"> <?php echo $text_special; ?></a> <a onclick="bookmark(document.location, '<?php echo addslashes($title); ?>');" style="background-image: url('catalog/view/theme/shop/image/bookmark.png');"> <?php echo $text_bookmark; ?></a><a href="<?php echo str_replace('&', '&amp;', $contact); ?>" style="background-image: url('catalog/view/theme/shop/image/contact.png');"><?php echo $text_contact; ?></a><a href="<?php echo str_replace('&', '&amp;', $sitemap); ?>" style="background-image: url('catalog/view/theme/shop/image/sitemap.png');"><?php echo $text_sitemap; ?></a></div> //other lines ... And now, save it. Now, we will go to the admin area. First log in with our stored admin credentials. Go to System | Settings in the admin panel: We will go to the Store tab. We will change the theme from default to shop, our new theme from a select list. You can make changes on your theme's CSS file. Resetting layout styles Before beginning our theme styling work, we must first reset all the styles. This will help us with cross-browser problems. Getting started We need to modify the stylesheet.css file of our new theme first. We will go to catalogviewthemeshopstylesheet. And open up stylesheet.css in our favourite editor. How to do it Now, we will add reset styles to our stylesheet.css file. First, we need to change the browser's margin, padding, and border properties. We will set styles for several different HTML tags. We can add extra style properties into it: html, body, div, span, applet, object, iframe, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, p, blockquote, pre, a, abbr, acronym, address, big, cite, code, del, dfn, em, font, img, ins, kbd, q, s, samp, small, strike, strong, sub, sup, tt, var, b, u, i, center, dl, dt, dd, ol, ul, li, fieldset, form, label, legend, table, caption, tbody, tfoot, thead, tr, th, td { margin: 0; padding: 0; border: 0; outline: 0; font-size: 100%; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent; } We will see the effect of our code in our store. The product images will come closer now. We adjust the line height of body tag. So, put the following code in the CSS file. body { line-height: 1; } This also squeezes the lines in the body element. The following image depicts this: By applying the above style, the line height of these tabs becomes shortened. We need to reset the style for ordered/unordered list elements. Hence, we use the following reset value: ol, ul { list-style: none; } It shows all the ul, ol tags without the default bullet properties. Now, we will reset the blockquote element styles. We will find the changes if we use blockquotes in our HTML code: blockquote, q { quotes: none; } blockquote:before, blockquote:after, q:before, q:after { content: ''; content: none; } For all the elements, we are going to change the focus-styling attributes. We change the outline properties to 0. We set the styles like the following: :focus { outline: 0; } There could be some styling for insert and deletion in some browsers. So, we will use this styling for the purpose: ins { text-decoration: none; } del { text-decoration: line-through; } We will control the styling of our tables also. We set the border and spacing qualities like the following: table { border-collapse: collapse; border-spacing: 0; } We still need to set the attribute cell-spacing to 0. So, our reset styling becomes the following: html, body, div, span, applet, object, iframe, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, p, blockquote, pre, a, abbr, acronym, address, big, cite, code, del, dfn, em, font, img, ins, kbd, q, s, samp, small, strike, strong, sub, sup, tt, var, b, u, i, center, dl, dt, dd, ol, ul, li, fieldset, form, label, legend, table, caption, tbody, tfoot, thead, tr, th, td { margin: 0; padding: 0; border: 0; outline: 0; font-size: 100%; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent; } body { line-height: 1; } ol, ul { list-style: none; } blockquote, q { quotes: none; } blockquote:before, blockquote:after, q:before, q:after { content: ''; content: none; } :focus { outline: 0; } ins { text-decoration: none; } del { text-decoration: line-through; } table { border-collapse: collapse; border-spacing: 0; } We can place it at the start of our site's style file stylesheet.css, or we can create a new file and put the content there also. To do that, just create a new CSS file within the catalogviewthemeshopstylesheet folder. For example, we can name the new style file as reset.css. If we use a new style file, then we need to add the style file in the controller.  

In this CakePHP tutorial, you'll learn how to set up a basic authentication system. Follow the recipes and you'll find all the code you need. Setting up a basic authentication system The first task to be completed when we are in the process of adding authentication to an application is to identify which controllers will need user access. Normally we would make every controller and action protected by default, and then we would specify which areas of our application allow public access. Getting ready We must have a users table that should contain, at least, two fields: username (to hold the username) and password (to hold a hash made out of the user's password). If you don't have a table for this purpose, you can use the following SQL statement to create it: CREATE TABLE `users`( `id` INT UNSIGNED AUTO_INCREMENT NOT NULL, `username` VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL, `password` CHAR(40) NOT NULL, PRIMARY KEY(`id`) ); How to do it... Create a file named users_controller.php and place it inside your app/controllers folder with the following contents: <?php class UsersController extends AppController { public function login() { } public function logout() { $this->redirect($this->Auth->logout()); } } ?> Create a file named login.ctp in your app/views/users folder (create the folder if you don't have one already), and add the following contents: <?php echo $this->Form->create(array('action'=>'login')); echo $this->Form->inputs(array( 'legend' => 'Login', 'username', 'password' )); echo $this->Form->end('Login'); ?> Create a file named app_controller.php in your app/ folder with the following contents: <?php class AppController extends Controller { public $components = array( 'Auth' => array( 'authorize' => 'controller' ), 'Session' ); public function isAuthorized() { return true; } } ?> Modify the UsersController, and add the following code before the login method: public function beforeFilter() { parent::beforeFilter(); $this->Auth->allow('add'); } public function add() { if (!empty($this->data)) { $this->User->create(); if ($this->User->save($this->data)) { $this->Session->setFlash('User created!'); $this->redirect(array('action'=>'login')); } else { $this->Session->setFlash('Please correct the errors'); } } } Create a file named add.ctp and place it in your app/views/users folder with the following contents: <?php echo $this->Form->create(); echo $this->Form->inputs(array( 'legend' => 'Signup', 'username', 'password' )); echo $this->Form->end('Submit'); ?> We now have a fully working authentication system. We can add new users by browsing to http://localhost/users/add, logging in by browsing to http://localhost/users/login, and finally logging out by browsing to http://localhost/users/logout. After creating a user, you should see the login form with a success message, as shown in the following screenshot: How it works... We start by creating two actions in the UsersController class: login(), to show and process submissions of the login form, and logout(), to handle users logging out. You may be surprised that the login() method has no logic whatsoever. To display the form, all we need to do is display the action's view. The form submission is taken care of by the Auth component, leaving us with no need to implement any controller logic. Therefore, the only implementation we need is to create a view for this action, which includes a simple form with two fields: username, and password. The inputs method of CakePHP's FormHelper is a shortcut designed to avoid multiple calls to the input method. By using it, we can create a full form with elements without the need to call FormHelper::input() several times. The logout() controller action simply calls the Auth component's logout() method. This method removes the logged-in user data from the session, and returns the address to which the user should be redirected after logging out, obtained from the previously configured logoutRedirect setting of the component (defaults to the application's home page if the setting was not configured.) Next, we add two components to the controller: Session, and Auth. The Session component is needed to create the messages (through the use of its setflash() method) that informs the user if a login attempt was unsuccessful, or if a user was created. The Auth component operates between your controller's actions and the incoming request by means of the beforeFilter callback method. It uses it's authorize setting to check what type of authentication scheme is to be used. Once the Auth component is added to a controller, all actions in that controller are not accessible unless there is a valid user logged in. This means that if we had any actions that should be public (such as the login() and add() actions in our controller), we would have to tell the Auth component about them. If one wishes to make some actions public, one can add the name of these actions to the allowedActions setting of the Auth component, or by calling its allow() method. We use the later approach to tell the Auth component that the add() action should be reachable without a logged-in user. The login() action is automatically added to the list of public actions by the Auth component. When the user attempts to reach an action that is not within the public actions, the Auth component checks the session to see if a user is already logged in. If a valid user is not found, it redirects the browser to the login action. If there is a user who is logged in, it uses the controller's isAuthorized method to check if the user has access. If its return value is true, it allows access, otherwise access is rejected. In our case, we implemented this method in AppController, our base controller class. If the attempted action requires a user who is logged in, the login() action is executed. After the user submits data using the login form, the component will first hash the password field, and then issue a find operation on the User model to find a valid account, using the posted username and password. If a valid record is found, it is saved to the session, marking the user as logged in. Hashing a password confirmation field When the Auth component is enabled on a controller and the user submits a form with a field named password (regardless if it is being rendered in the login form), the component will automatically hash the password field before executing the controller's action. The Auth component uses the salt defined in the configuration setting Security.salt (in your app/config/core.php file) to calculate the hash. Different salt values will produce different hashes even when using the same password. Therefore, make sure you change the salt on all your CakePHP applications, thus enhancing the security of your authentication system. This means that the action will never hold the plain password value, and this should be particularly noted when utilizing mechanisms to confirm password validations. When you are implementing such validation, make sure you hash the confirmation field using the proper method: if (!empty($this->data)) { $this->data['User']['confirm_password'] = $this->Auth- >password($this->data['User']['confirm_password']); // Continue with processing } Using and configuring the Auth component If there is something that defines the Auth component, it is its flexibility that accounts for different types of authentication modes, each of these modes serving different needs. In this recipe, you will learn how to modify the component's default behavior, and how to choose between the different authentications modes. Getting ready We should have a fully working authentication system, so follow the entire recipe Setting up a basic authentication system. We will also add support to have disabled user accounts. Add a field named active to your users table with the following SQL statement: ALTER TABLE `users` ADD COLUMN `active` TINYINT UNSIGNED NOT NULL default 1; How to do it... Modify the definition of the Auth component in your AppController class, so it looks like the following: public $components = array( 'Auth' => array( 'authorize' => 'controller', 'loginRedirect' => array( 'admin' => false, 'controller' => 'users', 'action' => 'dashboard' ), 'loginError' => 'Invalid account specified', 'authError' => 'You don't have the right permission' ), 'Session' ); Now while still editing your app/app_controller.php file, place the following code right below the components property declaration, at the beginning of the beforeFilter method in your AppController class: public function beforeFilter() { if ($this->Auth->getModel()->hasField('active')) {$this->Auth->userScope = array('active' => 1); } } Copy the default layout from cake/libs/view/layouts/default.ctp to your app/views/layouts directory, and make sure you place the following line in your layout where you wish to display authentication messages: <?php echo $this->Session->flash('auth'); ?> Edit your app/controllers/users_controller.php file and place the following method right below the logout() method: public function dashboard() { } Finally, create the view for this newly added action in a file named dashboard.ctp and place it in your app/views/users folder with the following contents: <p>Welcome!</p> If you now browse to http://localhost/users/login and enter the wrong credentials (wrong username and/or password), you should see the error message shown in the following screenshot: How it works... As the Auth component does its magic right before a controller action is executed, we either need to specify its settings in the beforeFilter callback, or pass them in an array when adding the component to the components property. A common place to do it is in the beforeFilter() method of the AppController class, as by doing so we can share the same authentication settings throughout all our controllers. This recipe changes some Auth settings, so that whenever a valid user logs in, they are automatically taken to a dashboard action in the UsersController (done via the loginRedirect setting.) It also adds some default error messages through the component's respective settings: loginError for when the given account is invalid, and authError for when there is a valid account, but the action is not authorized (which can be achieved by returning false from the isAuthorized() method implemented in AppController.) It also sets the component's userScope setting in AppController::beforeFilter(). This setting allows us to define which conditions the User find operation need to match to allow a user account to log in. By adding the userScope setting, we ensure that only user records that have the active field set to 1 are allowed access. Changing the default user model As you may have noticed, the role of the User model is crucial, not only to fetch the right user account, but also to check the permissions on some of the authentication schemes. By default, the Auth component will look for a User model, but you can change which model is to be used by setting the userModel property or the userModel key in the settings array. For example, if your user model is Account, you would add the following setting when adding the Auth component to your controller: 'userModel' => 'Account' Or equivalently, you would add the following to the beforeFilter method of your AppController class, in the block of code where you are setting up the component: $this->Auth->userModel = 'Account'; There's more... The $authorize property of the Auth component (or the authorize key in the Auth component settings array) defines which authentication scheme should be used. Possible values are: controller: It makes the component use the controller's isAuthorized method, which returns true to allow access, or false to reject it. This method is particularly useful when obtaining the logged-in user model: It is similar to controller; instead of using the controller to call the method, it looks for the isAuthorized method in the User model. First, it tries to map the controller's action to a CRUD operation (one of 'create', 'read', 'update', or 'delete'), and then calls the method with three arguments: the user record, the controller that is being accessed, and the CRUD operation (or actual controller action) that is to be executed. object: It is similar to model; instead of using the model to call the method, it looks for the isAuthorized method in a given class. In order to specify which class, set the AuthComponent::$object property to an instance of such a class. It calls the method with three arguments: the user record, the controller that is being accessed, and the action that is to be executed. actions: It uses the Acl component to check for access, which allows a much more grained access control. crud: It is similar to actions; the difference lies in the fact that it first tries to map the controller's action to a CRUD operation (one of 'create', 'read', 'update', or 'delete'.)

  concrete5 Beginner's Guide Create and customize your own website with the Concrete5 Beginner's Guide What's a package? Before we start creating our package, here are a few words about the functionality and purpose of packages: They can hold a single or several themes together You can include blocks which your theme needs You can check the requirements during the installation process in case your package depends on other blocks, configurations, and so on A package can be used to hook into events raised by concrete5 to execute custom code during different kind of actions You can create jobs, which run periodically to improve or check things in your website These are the most important things you can do with a package; some of it doesn't depend on packages, but is easier to handle if you use packages. It's up to you, but putting every extension in a package might even be useful if there's just a single element in it—why? You never have to worry where to extract the add-on. It always belongs in the packages directory An add-on wrapped in a package can be submitted to the concrete5 marketplace allowing you to earn money or make some people in the community happy by releasing your add-on for free Package structure We've already looked at different structures and you are probably already familiar with most of the directories in concrete5. Before we continue, here are a few words about the package structure, as it's essential that you understand its concept before we continue. A package is basically a complete concrete5 structure within one directory. All the directories are optional though. No need to create all of them, but you can create and use all of them within a single package. The directory concrete is a lot like a package as well; it's just located in its own directory and not within packages. Package controller Like the blocks we've created, the package has a controller as well. First of all, it is used to handle the installation process, but it's not limited to that. We can handle events and a few more things in the package controller; there's more about that later in this article. For now, we only need the controller to make sure the dashboard knows the package name and description. Time for action - creating the package controller Carry out the following steps: First, create a new directory named c5book in packages. Within that directory, create a file named controller.php and put the following content in it: <?php defined('C5_EXECUTE') or die(_("Access Denied.")); class c5bookPackage extends Package { protected $pkgHandle = 'c5book'; protected $appVersionRequired = '5.4.0'; protected $pkgVersion = '1.0'; public function getPackageDescription() { return t("Theme, Templates and Blocks from concrete5 for Beginner's"); } public function getPackageName() { return t("c5book"); } public function install() { $pkg = parent::install(); } } ?> You can create a file named icon.png 97 x 97 pixels with 4px rounded transparent corners. This is the official specification that you have to follow if you want to upload your add-on to the concrete5 marketplace. Once you've created the directory and the mandatory controller, you can go to your dashboard and click on Add Functionality. It looks a lot like a block but when you click on Install, the add-on is going to appear in the packages section. What just happened? The controller we created looks and works a lot like a block controller, which you should have seen and created already. However, let's go through all the elements of the package controller anyway, as it's important that you understand them: pkgHandle: A unique handle for your package. You'll need this when you access your package from code. appVersionRequired: The minimum version required to install the add-on. concrete5 will check that during the installation process. pkgVersion: The current version of the package. Make sure that you change the number when you release an update for a package; concrete5 has to know that it is installing an update and not a new version. getPackageDescription: Returns the description of your package. Use the t-function to keep it translatable. getPackageName: The same as above, just a bit shorter. install: You could remove this method in the controller above, since we're only calling its parent method and don't check anything else. It has no influence, but we'll need this method later when we put blocks in our package. It's just a skeleton for the next steps at the moment. Moving templates into package Remember the templates we've created? We placed them in the top level blocks directory. Worked like a charm but imagine what happens when you create a theme which also needs some block templates in order to make sure the blocks look like the theme? You'd have to copy files into the blocks directory as well as themes. This is exactly what we're trying to avoid with packages. It's rather easy with templates; they work almost anywhere. You just have to copy the folder slideshow from blocks to packages/c5book/blocks, as shown in the following screenshot: This step was even easier than most things we did before. We simply moved our templates into a different directory—nothing else. concrete5 looks for custom templates in different places like: concrete/blocks/<block-name>/templates blocks/<block-name>/templates packages/<package-name>/blocks/<block-name>/templates It doesn't matter where you put your templates, concrete5 will find them. Moving themes and blocks into the package Now that we've got our templates in the package, let's move the new blocks we've created into that package as well. The process is similar, but we have to call a method in the installer which installs our block. concrete5 does not automatically install blocks within packages. This means that we have to extend the empty install method shown earlier. Before we move the blocks into the package you should remove all blocks first. To do this, go to your dashboard, click on Add Functionality, click on the Edit button next to the block you want to move, and click on the Remove button in the next screen. We'll start with the jqzoom block. Please note; removing a block will of course, remove all the blocks you've added to your pages. Content will be lost if you move a block into a package after you've already used it. Time for action – moving jQZoom block into the package Carry out the following steps: As mentioned earlier, remove the jqzoom block from you website by using the Add Functionality section in your dashboard. Move the directory blocks/jqzoom to packages/c5book/blocks. Open the package controller we created a few pages earlier; you can find it at packages/c5book/controller.php. The following snippet shows only a part of the controller, the install method. The only thing you have to do is insert the highlighted line: public function install() { $pkg = parent::install(); // install blocks BlockType::installBlockTypeFromPackage('jqzoom', $pkg); } Save the file and go to your dashboard again. Select Add Functionality and locate the c5book package; click on Edit and then Uninstall Package and confirm the process on the next screen. Back on the Add Functionality screen, reinstall the package again, which will automatically install the block. What just happened? Besides moving files, we only had to add a single line of code to our existing package controller. This is necessary, because blocks within packages aren't automatically installed. When installing a package, only the install method of the controller is called, exactly the place where we hook into and install our block. The installBlockTypeFromPackage method takes two parameters: The block handle and the package object. However, this doesn't mean that packages behave like namespaces. What does this mean? A block is connected to a package. This is necessary in order to be able to uninstall the block when removing the package along with some other reasons. Even though there's a connection between the two objects, a block handle must be unique across all packages. You've seen that we had to remove and reinstall the package several times while we only moved a block. At this point, it probably looks a bit weird to do that, especially as you're going to lose some content on your website. However, when you're more familiar with the concrete5 framework, you'll usually know if you're going to need a package and make that decision before you start creating new blocks. If you're still in doubt, don't worry about it too much and create a package and not just a block. Using a package is usually the safest choice. Don't forget that all instances of a block will be removed from all pages when you uninstall the block from your website. Make sure your package structure doesn't change before you start adding content to your website. Time for action - moving the PDF block into the package Some blocks depend on helpers, files and libraries, which aren't in the block directory. The PDF generator block is such an example. It depends on a file found in the tools directory in the root of your concrete5 website. How do we include such a file in a package? Move the pdf directory from blocks to packages/c5book/blocks since we also want to include the block in the package. Locate the c5book directory within packages and create a new subdirectory named tools. Move generate_pdf.php from tools to packages/c5book/tools. Create another directory named libraries in packages/c5book. Move the mpdf50 from libraries to packages/c5book/libraries. As we've moved two objects, we have to make sure our code looks for them in the right place. Open packages/c5book/tools/generate.php and look for Loader::library at the beginning of the file. We have to add a second parameter to Loader::library, as shown here: <?php defined('C5_EXECUTE') or die(_("Access Denied.")); Loader::library('mpdf50/mpdf', 'c5book'); $fh = Loader::helper('file'); $header = <<<EOT <style type="text/css"> body { font-family: Helvetica, Arial; } h1 { border-bottom: 1px solid black; } </style> EOT; Next, open packages/c5book/blocks/pdf/view.php. We have to add the package handle as the second parameter to make sure the tool file is loaded from the package. <!--hidden_in_pdf_start--> <?php defined('C5_EXECUTE') or die(_('Access Denied.')); $nh = Loader::helper('navigation'); $url = Loader::helper('concrete/urls'); $toolsUrl = $url->getToolsURL('generate_pdf', 'c5book'); $toolsUrl .= '?p=' . rawurlencode($nh->getLinkToCollection($this- >c, true)); echo "<a href="{$toolsUrl}">PDF</a>"; ?> <!--hidden_in_pdf_end--> What just happened? In the preceding example, we put got a file in the tools directory and a PDF generator in the libraries directory, which we had to move as well. Even at the risk of saying the same thing several times: A package can contain any element of concrete5—libraries, tools, controllers, images, and so on. By putting all files in a single package directory, we can make sure that all files are installed at once, thus making sure all dependencies are met. Nothing has changed beside the small changes we've made to the commands, which access or load an element. A helper behaves like a helper, no matter where it's located. Have a go hero – move more add-ons We've moved two different blocks into our new package, along with the slideshow block templates. These aren't all blocks we've created so far. Try to move all add-ons we've created into our new package. If you need more information about that process, have a look at the following page: http://www.concrete5.org/documentation/developers/system/packages/

  WordPress 3 Plugin Development Essentials Create your own powerful, interactive plugins to extend and add features to your WordPress site         Read more about this book       WordPress is a popular content management system (CMS), most renowned for its use as a blogging / publishing application. According to usage statistics tracker, BuiltWith (http://builtWith.com), WordPress is considered to be the most popular blogging software on the planet—not bad for something that has only been around officially since 2003. Before we develop any substantial plugins of our own, let's take a few moments to look at what other people have done, so we get an idea of what the final product might look like. By this point, you should have a fresh version of WordPress installed and running somewhere for you to play with. It is important that your installation of WordPress is one with which you can tinker. In this article by Brian Bondari and Everett Griffiths, authors of WordPress 3 Plugin Development Essentials, we will purposely break a few things to help see how they work, so please don't try anything in this article on a live production site. Deconstructing an existing plugin: "Hello Dolly" WordPress ships with a simple plugin named "Hello Dolly". Its name is a whimsical take on the programmer's obligatory "Hello, World!", and it is trotted out only for pedantic explanations like the one that follows (unless, of course, you really do want random lyrics by Jerry Herman to grace your administration screens). Activating the plugin Let's activate this plugin so we can have a look at what it does: Browse to your WordPress Dashboard at http://yoursite.com/wp-admin/. Navigate to the Plugins section. Under the Hello Dolly title, click on the Activate link. You should now see a random lyric appear in the top-right portion of the Dashboard. Refresh the page a few times to get the full effect. Examining the hello.php file Now that we've tried out the "Hello Dolly" plugin, let's have a closer look. In your favorite text editor, open up the /wp-content/plugins/hello.php file. Can you identify the following integral parts? The Information Header which describes details about the plugin (author and description). This is contained in a large PHP /* comment */. User-defined functions, such as the hello_dolly() function. The add_action() and/or add_filter() functions, which hook a WordPress event to a user-defined function. It looks pretty simple, right? That's all you need for a plugin: An information header Some user-defined functions add_action() and/or add_filter() functions In your WordPress Dashboard, ensure that the "Hello Dolly" plugin has been activated. If applicable, use your preferred (s)FTP program to connect to your WordPress installation. Using your text editor, temporarily delete the information header from wpcontent/ plugins/hello.php and save the file (you can save the header elsewhere for now). Save the file. Refresh the Plugins page in your browser. You should get a warning from WordPress stating that the plugin does not have a valid header: Ensure that the "Hello Dolly" plugin is active. Open the /wp-content/plugins/hello.php file in your text editor. Immediately before the line that contains function hello_dolly_get_lyric, type in some gibberish text, such as "asdfasdf" and save the file. Reload the plugins page in your browser. This should generate a parse error, something like: pre width="70"> Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_FUNCTION in /path/to/ wordpress/html/wp-content/plugins/hello.php on line 16 Author: Listed below the plugin name Author URI: Together with "Author", this creates a link to the author's site Description: Main block of text describing the plugin Plugin Name: The displayed name of the plugin Plugin URI: Destination of the "Visit plugin site" link Version: Use this to track your changes over time Now that we've identified the critical component parts, let's examine them in more detail. Information header Don't just skim this section thinking it's a waste of breath on the self-explanatory header fields. Unlike a normal PHP file in which the comments are purely optional, in WordPress plugin and theme files, the Information Header is required! It is this block of text that causes a file to show up on WordPress' radar so that you can activate it or deactivate it. If your plugin is missing a valid information header, you cannot use it! Exercise—breaking the header To reinforce that the information header is an integral part of a plugin, try the following exercise: After you've seen the tragic consequences, put the header information back into the hello.php file. This should make it abundantly clear to you that the information header is absolutely vital for every WordPress plugin. If your plugin has multiple files, the header should be inside the primary file—in this article we use index.php as our primary file, but many plugins use a file named after the plugin name as their primary file. Location, name, and format The header itself is similar in form and function to other content management systems, such as Drupal's module.info files or Joomla's XML module configurations—it offers a way to store additional information about a plugin in a standardized format. The values can be extended, but the most common header values are listed below: For more information about header blocks, see the WordPress codex at: http://codex.wordpress.org/File_Header. In order for a PHP file to show up in WordPress' Plugins menu: The file must have a .php extension. The file must contain the information header somewhere in it (preferably at the beginning). The file must be either in the /wp-content/plugins directory, or in a subdirectory of the plugins directory. It cannot be more deeply nested. Understanding the Includes When you activate a plugin, the name of the file containing the information header is stored in the WordPress database. Each time a page is requested, WordPress goes through a laundry list of PHP files it needs to load, so activating a plugin ensures that your own files are on that list. To help illustrate this concept, let's break WordPress again. Exercise – parse errors Try the following exercise: Yikes! Your site is now broken. Why did this happen? We introduced errors into the plugin's main file (hello.php), so including it caused PHP and WordPress to choke. Delete the gibberish line from the hello.php file and save to return the plugin back to normal. The parse error only occurs if there is an error in an active plugin. Deactivated plugins are not included by WordPress and therefore their code is not parsed. You can try the same exercise after deactivating the plugin and you'll notice that WordPress does not raise any errors. Bonus for the curious In case you're wondering exactly where and how WordPress stores the information about activated plugins, have a look in the database. Using your MySQL client, you can browse the wp_options table or execute the following query: SELECT option_value FROM wp_options WHERE option_name='active_ plugins'; The active plugins are stored as a serialized PHP hash, referencing the file containing the header. The following is an example of what the serialized hash might contain if you had activated a plugin named "Bad Example". You can use PHP's unserialize() function to parse the contents of this string into a PHP variable as in the following script: <?php $active_plugin_str = 'a:1:{i:0;s:27:"bad-example/bad-example. php";}'; print_r( unserialize($active_plugin_str) ); ?> And here's its output: Array ( [0] => bad-example/bad-example.php )

Problem A basic messaging system should be able to manage messages, senders and recipients, folders that contain the messages, and email notifications. In our case, we are going to try and keep things simple where it makes sense to do so, but in one area, we will do things in a more complicated way simply because it will result in less wear and tear on the overall system. This is how the messages will be delivered to the users. Rather than following a standard email messaging system where each person gets a physical copy of a message, we are going to build our system in the same way that the MS Exchange server works. We are going to make one copy of a message and subscribe users to that message. So rather than have 50 messages for 50 recipients, we will have one message and 50 recipient subscriptions. The next problem lies in building a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) messaging editor. For this feature, there are many open source WYSIWYG editors; we will use one of those to save us a bit of time. We will be using one of the popular editors—X INHA. This editor can be downloaded for free here at http://xinha.webfactional.com/. You may have seen this editor already as it is widely used across many popular community sites. Design Let's take a look at the design of these features. Messages Messages are the core of any messaging system. Generally, a message would contain details like the sender of the message, receiver of the message, and other metadata like time sent, server from where it was sent, etc. and the message, subject, and body. In our case, the message will contain the sender, subject, body, and the data sent. It will also contain one additional field, i.e. the type of message (message, friend request, and so on). We will need to create a page that allows a user to compose a new message (as seen in the image at the start of this article). This interface should also allow a user to add his/her friends easily rather than force them to remember everyone. Also, this interface should allow a user to quickly snap together some HTML without ever having to look at HTML. This can be accomplished with a WYSIWYG editor. Recipients As we have already discussed that we are going to move some of the complexity away from the message, following a subscription model instead, you will find that most of the complexity of this system lies around the recipient concepts. In this case, the recipient subscription is what will be contained in a folder and will have a read status. With this design, we will remove some of the burden from the database. The overhead of doing this of course means that we now need to manage our data closely, as it is kept in many pieces. A more simple design that would result in more copies of data to be managed would be to create one message for each recipient. This is easier as each message can easily be deleted and moved around without having to worry about the copies of that message of the other recipients. Having said that, if the message is quite large, and more importantly if we were to allow file attachments, all the copies of the messages would be identical for each recipient. This would quickly bloat your database! Solution Now let's take a look at our solution. Implementing the database First let's take a look at what tables are needed: Messages A message will primarily be made up of the subject and its body. In addition to that we will need to know what type of message we are sending so that we can do some more fancy things in the UI down the road. In addition to this, we are going to maintain who owns/created the message at this level. There aren't really any major complexities to note here other than the fact that the Body is made up of a varchar(MAX) data type. If you feel this is too large for your system, feel free to make it anything you are comfortable with. The value you eventually use will drive the message for your system. MessageTypes Message Types allows us to assign a type to our messages. This is purely a lookup table that will allow us to know what the types are during queries. We will keep a list of enums in the code to make the lookups easier from that end. MessageRecipients A message recipient is simply the receiving party to the message. But as we try to minimize the data that we manage in our system, the message recipient is also a very important part of the message. In our case, it is the receiving party as well as all the things that the receiving party does with their subscription of that message. We will use this subscription to denote which folder the receiver is keeping the message in, and whether the receiver has read the message or not. Also, if the receiver chooses to delete the message, he/she can just delete the subscription to a message (unless they are the last subscription, in which case we will delete the message as well). The SQL for this subscription is actually quite straightforward. It tracks a relationship to the message, a relationship to the receiver, which folder the subscription is currently in, and the status of the message for this receiver. MessageRecipientTypes The message recipient type allows us to track the receiver of this message addressed in the TO, CC, or BCC fields. Initially, our interface will only have a TO field. We should add this bit of metadata though just in case we want to expand our capabilities down the road! This is another example of a lookup table that we might need to use in the SQL queries. In our case, we will have an enum defined that maintains this lookup for us on the code side. MessageStatusTypes MessageStatusTypes allows us to track what a recipient is doing with his/her copy of the message, whether they have read the message, replied to the message, and so on. This is primarily so that we can change the UI to refiect its status to the recipient. However, we could also create a dashboard down the road for the senders of the messages to know whether their message was read or not and by whom (think of all the big brother things one could do...but probably should not do!). MessageFolders MessageFolders in our first round of implementation will simply hold copies of new messages in the Inbox and copies of sent messages in the Sent folder. We will also have a trash folder and a spam folder. That said, we always wanted to build a system with the future in mind if it doesn't require a lot of extra work, and so we have also baked in the concept of a user being able to create and manage his/her own folders. Therefore, rather than just see the MessageFolders table as another lookup table, you will see that there is an IsSystem fiag to denote which folders are to be seen system-wide. And you will see an AccountID column for custom folders so that we know who owns which folders. Creating the relationships Once all the tables are created, we can create the relationships. For this set of tables, we have relationships between the following tables: Messages and MessageRecipients Messages and Accounts Messages and MessageTypes MessageRecipients and MessageRecipientTypes MessageRecipients and MessageFolders MessageRecipients and MessageStatusTypes Setting up the data access layer The data access layer in this case is very straightforward. Open up your Fisharoo.edmx file and add all of your new message-oriented tables. Once you save this, you should now have a list of new domain objects in your arsenal (see the previous screenshot). Building repositories With these new tables come some additional repositories. We will create the following repositories. MessageRepository MessageRecipientRepository MessageFolderRepository A detailed creation of repositories is out of the scope of this article. We will create a method for selecting a single entity by ID, a group of entities by their parents, saving entities, and deleting entities. Having said that, there are a couple of methods that have something special in the set of repositories. As we are using message subscriptions, we don't necessarily want to delete recipients haphazardly. We may want to delete a recipient, and if that recipient is the last recipient with a subscription to a message, we may also want to delete the message. On the other end of the spectrum, if we do delete a message, we may also want to remove all the recipient subscriptions. In addition to these different ways of deleting data, we will also run into a scenario where selecting a single entity from our repositories won't be quite good enough. So in this case, we have created an aggregate class that will allow us to select several entities at once for use in our inbox scenarios. MessageRepository When we think of a standard inbox, we know that we need to see the messages that we have, who sent them, when they were sent, and at least the subject of their message. In this case, we have discussed two different entities here. When we think about the fact that we also need to know who they were sent to, we have added a third entity. While we could run three separate queries for this data, it would be better for us to run one query (as we would have done in the old days) and return the data that we need in one shot. What do we do? In this case, we need to create an aggregate. This is a class that contains other entities. We will therefore create a MessageWithRecipient class that will contain the sender's account info, the message, and the recipient. This should provide us with enough data to represent messages in our inbox view later. Before we write any queries, we first need to create the aggregate. //Fisharoo/DataAccess/MessageWithRecipient.cs namespace Fisharoo.DataAccess { public class MessageWithRecipient { public Account Sender { get; set; } public Message Message { get; set; } public MessageRecipient MessageRecipient{ get; set; } } } With this aggregate in place we can now turn our attention to the repository that will get all this data for us. //Fisharoo/DataAccess/Repositories/MessageRepository.cs public List<MessageWithRecipient> GetMessagesByAccountID(Int32 AccountID, Int32 PageNumber, MessageFolders Folder) { List<MessageWithRecipient> result = new List<MessageWithRecipient>(); using(FisharooDataContext dc = conn.GetContext()) { IEnumerable<MessageWithRecipient> messages = (from r in dc.MessageRecipients join m in dc.Messages on r.MessageID equals m.MessageID join a in dc.Accounts on m.SentByAccountID equals a.AccountID where r.AccountID == AccountID && r.MessageFolderID == (int)Folder orderby m.CreateDate descending select new MessageWithRecipient() { Sender = a, Message = m, MessageRecipient = r }).Skip((PageNumber - 1)*10).Take(10); result = messages.ToList(); } return result; } This is a fun method! This method involves selecting a list of our MessageWithRecipient aggregate objects. The LINQ query is joining all the tables that we need and selecting a new instance of the MessageWithRecipient aggregate, that is then populated with the three classes that we need in the aggregate. Additionally, we have introduced some paging logic with the .Skip and .Take methods to produce a subset of the MessageWithRecipient objects. In addition to the selection method above, we also need to discuss the delete method for this repository. As we have the data holding a subscription to our message data, it is important that we first remove all the subscriptions prior to removing the message itself. //Fisharoo/DataAccess/Repositories/MessageRepository.cs public void DeleteMessage(Message message) { using (FisharooDataContext dc = conn.GetContext()) { IEnumerable<MessageRecipient> recipients = dc.MessageRecipients .Where(mr => mr.MessageID == message.MessageID); foreach (MessageRecipient mr in recipients) { dc.MessageRecipients.DeleteObject(mr); } dc.Messages.DeleteObject(message); dc.SaveChanges(); } } This is easily accomplished by retrieving all the MessageRecipients for the needed MessageID from the MessageRecipients in DataContext. Once we have the list, we iterate over each recipient and remove it from DataContext's MessageRecipients list. Finally, we delete the message and save changes. MessageRecipientRepository The message recipient repository is considerably easier. It simply has an altered delete statement to adjust for the fact that if we delete the last subscription to a message, it will amount to deleting the message. //Fisharoo/DataAccess/Repositories/MessageRecipientRepository.cs public void DeleteMessageRecipient(MessageRecipient messageRecipient) { using (FisharooDataContext dc = conn.GetContext()) { dc.MessageRecipients.DeleteObject(dc.MessageRecipients.Where (mr=> mr.MessageRecipientID.Equals (messageRecipient.MessageRecipientID)) .FirstOrDefault()); //if the last recipient was deleted //...also delete the message int RemainingRecipientCount = dc.MessageRecipients.Where(mr => mr.MessageID == messageRecipient.MessageID).Count(); if (RemainingRecipientCount == 0) { dc.Messages.DeleteObject(dc.Messages.Where(m => m.MessageID == messageRecipient.MessageID). FirstOrDefault()); } dc.SaveChanges(); } } In this method, we delete the recipient in question. We then get a count of the remaining recipients for the message, which has the last recipient removed. If that count is zero, then there are no more recipients remaining for that message. In that case we perform a delete on that message and remove it from the system as well.

  Science Teaching with Moodle 2.0 Create interactive lessons and activities in Moodle to enhance your students' understanding and enjoyment of science         Read more about this book       (For more resources on Moodle 2.0, see here.) One of the biggest things to come out of the UK in terms of modern education practice is Assessment for Learning (AfL). This is a phrase coined by Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam in the late 1990s. If this is the first time you have heard the phrase "assessment for learning" then refer to:Inside the Black Box: Raising standards through classroom assessment King's College, London. Black, P.J. & Wiliam, D. (1998).It's a great place to start and a reference you'll regularly go back to, again and again. Assessment for learning Let's begin by looking at what good assessment is; then we'll go through how you can apply this to your Moodle course. Assessment for learning informs you as to what your students have learned, gives an idea what topics, concepts, or areas they find hard and, most importantly, gives you and them an idea of how to improve. Assessment can unfortunately have a negative effect on people. It can make a huge difference when students are involved in their own assessments, but serves very little purpose when it is used by pupils for comparisons or to boost ego. It is important for learners to understand the reasons behind assessment, whether it is to help them understand something, a summative test designed to award a level of competency, or just a quick review so they can see how they are doing. It is vital, however, that all learners can 'do well' in assessments, which may sound contradictory. Progress is much faster for learners who are confident, secure, and happy with trying new ideas. Without that, little learning can happen. This may mean creating different levels of assessment for a particular task so that all pupils can access it. Assessment comes in three main types—teacher/tutor assessment, self assessment, and peer assessment. The latter two will be covered in later articles. The focus of this article will be teacher assessment to provide feedback to students. In the next article, we will be drilling down deeper into the analysis of assessments to inform your teaching. Feedback The most important thing a teacher can provide is to let their students know how they are doing. Moodle is great for this. You could, for instance, create a multiple-choice quiz and give your learners detailed responses for every incorrect answer, even giving them a link to another resource or website that would help them learn from their mistakes. The feedback cycle The feedback cycle is something you could use when creating tasks designed to provide feedback to your students on their learning. The following image shows you the three phases of the feedback cycle: Learning is a continual process of attempting tasks, finding out if you can do them, and then working out what you need to do to get even better. If you want to find out more about the current teaching methodologies in the UK, there are some great videos and good practice at https://www.ssatrust.org.uk/Pages/home.aspx. Using ratings in forums It is important that students get feedback on their work. Without it, they will never know how to improve. This feedback could be from the teacher, by reflection after comparing their work to some criteria, or from their peers. This last reason is why, more often than not, it is useful to include some sort of ratings in the forums you set up, along with comments for improvement. Why use ratings? It can be a good idea initially to force pupils to use the rating systems in forums. To do this, you could set some specific homework, asking them to post their replies to a discussion point. It should require them to read and reply to at least two other posts, providing ratings and written feedback. Interestingly, pupils tend to be very fair and will often do much more than the minimum. It's a good idea to be quite specific when using ratings. For instance, what does 5 out of 5 actually mean? Criterionbased judgments give the learner a much better idea of specifically what needs to be done to improve. These criteria could be agreed on beforehand and form part of your forum introduction. Again, for written comments, it is best to be specific. "Great post" doesn't really help the learner much, apart from a bit of an ego boost. Of course, there are times where you may wish to do this but there is lots of evidence that it doesn't help their understanding of scientific ideas, (see Inside the Black Box: Black, P.J. & Wiliam, D. 1998). You could ask your learners to suggest two things that were really good about the post, and one thing that could be improved. They should phrase the feedback "perhaps next time you could…". A polite suggestion, rather than a criticism that doesn't make the student giving the advice sound bigheaded. It's also good practice to get the person receiving the feedback to say "thank you", as it will encourage the person giving the feedback to do it more often. Aggregate of ratings In forums, there are five ways in which ratings are totaled (or aggregated), described as follows. These can be set by clicking on the edit icon alongside the forum link on the main course page. Average: This is the mean of all the ratings. Count: This gives you the sum of the number of posts. There are not many examples where this might be useful, other than to check that users have contributed a certain number of times. Max: This is the highest rating given for a persons post. Useful when you wish to get your users to display certain levels of competency. Min: It is the lowest rating given for a persons post. Sum: This is all the ratings combined to give a total. It is useful when you want to encourage participation and quality responses.This is different than count, as the total cannot exceed the maximum rating for the forum. In a set up forum(download here -ch:2) we will set the aggregate type and give the rating a scale. The scale chosen here gives a maximum of 5 for each post. Before setting this forum take the time to go through the scale and share a rubric with your learners, which explains what a post must include to be given a 1, or a 2, and so on. It is usually good to show them examples of different posts so they get an idea of what makes a great post that is a 5. Another way you could use ratings is to use a scale to indicate how strongly the reader agrees or disagrees with the post. You could do this by creating a custom grade scale with words to represent the level of agreement. An example of this would be a scale that pupils can award the following values: Agree totally Agree somewhat Neither agree nor disagree Disagree with some points Disagree totally Grade scales There are two standard grade scales in Moodle. One is called Separate and Connected ways of knowing. It has the following choices that you could award for a discussion post: Mostly separate knowing Separate and connected Mostly connected knowing A person who is in the 'mostly separate knowing' category has their opinions based on fact and is very objective. A person who is in the 'mostly connected knowing' category is empathetic and tries to see the other person's point of view. The other standard scale is called Satisfactory and allows users to choose from the following labels: Not satisfactory Satisfactory Outstanding You can set up custom scales, which could be anything; grade letters, levels, or even colors could be awarded to posts to represent de Bono's Thinking Hats. Here is a link if you are not familiar with the concept: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Thinking_Hats. To set up custom scales, click the Grades link in the settings block followed by Scales. Assignments Assignment activities are a nice introduction to getting users submitting more traditional types of work on Moodle. They are very easy to set up and provide the added benefit of organizing all of the submitted work in one place. There are a number of different assessment types that you can set up in Moodle. Some of these involve users submitting a file or files online, or even offline. There are: Online text Upload a single file Advanced uploading of files Offline Think of an assignment in the same way you would have students hand in or e-mail you a piece of written work. Online text The online text assignment allows you to set up an assignment where your users are required to type or copy and paste their work directly into the browser. The really useful thing about online text assignments is that you can choose to be able to comment on their work inline. This means that you will be able to give them feedback that they can use to improve their work and resubmit it. However, if students are typing more than a paragraph of text there is the chance that the web page might timeout, so they would lose their work. Like grading forums, you can also specify how many marks the assignment is worth, or specify a particular scale that the work will be judged against. A lot of the time a simple scale can be used to assess the piece of work, for instance unsatisfactory, satisfactory or outstanding. This would be paired with some detailed feedback for improvement. The assignment that is going to be set up here will be for the third topic "movement in and out of cells". To add an online text activity, choose it from the Add an activity drop-down menu. This activity would be a lead up to an experiment investigating how osmosis acts on pieces of potato in sugar solutions. The aim here is to get your users to justify their predictions. You can follow these same steps to set up any activity in Moodle. As with all things in Moodle it needs a name and description. Set the activity available for one week although users will not be prevented from handing it in late. Use the Satisfactory scale for grading and allow resubmitting with comments inline. It's also nice to set the e-mail alerts to teachers to yes so that you will get an e-mail when a new piece of work is submitted. For this to work properly, you must remember to add yourself to the course as a teacher and also add yourself to a group. Here are the assignment settings. The other settings can be left as standard: As a teacher, if you click the link View submitted assignments at the top-right-hand side of the activity, you'll be taken to the screen where you can grade and comment on the work. It should look a little like the following image. You can also download all assignments as a ZIP file. Upload a single file The 'upload a single file' activity, as the name suggests, is an assignment where you require the user to upload a single file. This file can be nearly any format (as long as it doesn't pose a threat to the server). Let's take an example of how you can use this activity type in a very standard way. Later, you will learn to do this more creatively using the 'advanced uploading of files' activity. Here are the settings that you could choose if you are asking your users to keep a food diary and submit it as an assignment. This is something that you would not give a grade for, just some written feedback. Again, the common module settings will be left on the default settings. Advanced uploading of files With this activity, you are able to specify a maximum number of upload files and there is a button labeled Send for marking that allows students to let you know when work is ready for marking. You can also set up draft and submission stages and it is the only assignment type where teachers can send back a file (for example, a Word document) as a response to the student. If you are a fan of getting pupils to use their cell phones in science lessons, you could get them to video their experiments or take photos to include in lab reports. Given next are the settings to use for a video assignment: Offline activity The offline activity is really useful if you want to keep records of class work or assessments on Moodle. The set up is very similar to the other activity types, but allows you to input a series of grades using any of the different scales. So rather than keeping grades from bookwork or tests in a separate spreadsheet or mark book they can be stored in the gradebook in Moodle. This means that your students can refer to them at any time and like the other types of activity the users are notified by e-mail of any grade or comments that you give them. For any assignment that you give, it is important to remember to let your students know what the marking criteria is that they are working towards. Students need to know what is good work, so you could even show exemplar work from last year as a resource that they would look at before attempting your assignment.

Oracle Application Express 4.0 with Ext JS Deliver rich desktop-styled Oracle APEX applications using the powerful Ext JS JavaScript library Plug-ins and dynamic actions are the two most exciting new features for developers in APEX 4.0. Combining them with Ext JS components is a recipe for success. For the first time we now have the ability to add custom "widgets" directly into APEX that can be used declaratively in the same way as native APEX components. Plug-ins and dynamic actions are supported with back end integration, allowing developers to make use of APEX provided PL/SQL APIs to simplify component development. Plug-ins give developers a supported mechanism to enhance the existing built-in functionality by writing custom PL/SQL components for item types, regions, and processes. Dynamic actions provide developers with a way to define client-side behavior declaratively without needing to know JavaScript. Using a simple wizard, developers can select a page item and a condition, enter a value, and select an action (for example, Show, Hide, Enable, and Show Item Row). Most APEX developers come from a database development background. So, they are much more comfortable coding with PL/SQL than JavaScript. The sooner work is focused on PL/SQL development the more productive APEX developers become. The ability to create plug-ins that can be used declaratively means developers don't have to write page-specific JavaScript for items on a page, or use messy "hacks" to attach additional JavaScript functionality to standard APEX items. Ext JS provides a rich library of sophisticated JavaScript components just waiting to be integrated into APEX using plug-ins. A home for your plug-ins and dynamic actions APEX allows you to create plug-ins for item, region, dynamic action, and process types. Like templates and themes, plug-ins are designed to be shared, so they can be easily exported and imported from one workspace application to another. Plug-ins can also be subscribed, providing a way to easily share and update common attributes between plug-ins. Building a better Number Field APEX 4.0 introduced the Number Field as a new item type, allowing you to configure number-range checks by optionally specifying minimum and maximum value attributes. It also automatically checks that the entered value is a number, and performs NOT NULL validation as well. You can also specify a format mask for the number as well, presumably to enforce decimal places. This all sounds great, and it does work as described, but only after you have submitted the page for processing on the server. The following screenshot shows the APEX and Ext versions of the Number Field, both setup with a valid number range of 1 to 10,000. The APEX version allows you to enter any characters you want, including letters. The Ext version automatically filters the keys pressed to only accept numbers, conditionally the decimal separator, and the negative sign. It also highlights invalid values when you go outside the valid number range. We are going to build a better Number Field using APEX plug-ins to provide better functionality on the client side, and still maintain the same level of server-side validation. The Number Field is quite a simple example, allowing us to be introduced to how APEX plug-ins work without getting bogged down in the details. The process of building a plug-in requires the following: Creating a plug-in in your application workspace Creating a test page containing your plug-in and necessary extras to test it Running your application to test functionality Repeating the build/test cycle, progressively adding more features until satisfied with the result Creating a plug-in item For our Number Field, we will be creating an item plug-in. So, navigate to the plug-ins page in Application Builder, found under Application Builder | Application xxx | Shared Components | Plug-ins, and press Create to open the Plug-in Create/Edit page. Start filling in the following fields: Name: Ext.form.NumberField. Here, I'm using the Ext naming for the widget, but that's just for a convenience. Internal Name: Oracle's recommendation here is to use your organization's domain name as a prefix. So for example, a company domain of mycompany. com would prefix a plug-in named Slider, would result in an internal name of COM.MYCOMPANY.SLIDER. File Prefix: As we are referencing the Ext JavaScript libraries in our page template, we can skip this field completely. For specialized plug-ins that are only used on a handful of specific pages, you would attach a JavaScript file here. Source: For the PL/SQL source code required to implement our plug-in, you can either enter it as a PL/SQL anonymous block of code that contains functions for rendering, validating and AJAX callbacks, or refer to code in a PL/SQL package in the database. You get better performance using PL/SQL packages in the database, so that's the smart way to go. Simply include your package function names in the Callbacks section, as shown in the following screenshot, noting that no AJAX function name is specified as no AJAX functionality is required for this plug-in. The package doesn't need to exist at this time—the form will submit successfully anyway. Standard attributes: In addition to being able to create up to ten custom attributes, the APEX team has made the standard attributes available for plug-ins to use. This is really useful, because the standard attributes comprise elements that are useful for most components, such as width and height. They also have items such as List of Values (LOV), which have more complicated validation rules already built-in, checking SQL queries used for the LOV source are valid queries, and so on. For the Number Field, only a few attributes have been checked: IsVisible Widget: Indicating the element will be displayed Session State Changeable: So that APEX knows to store the value of the item in session state Has Read Only Attribute: So that conditional logic can be used to make the item read only Has Width Attributes: Allowing the width of the item to be set Notice that some of the attributes are disabled in the following screenshot. This is because the APEX Builder conditionally enables the checkboxes that are dependent on another attribute. So, in this screenshot the List of Values Required, Has LOV Display Null Attributes, and Has Cascading LOV Attributes checkboxes are disabled, because they are dependant on the Has List of Values checkbox. Once it is checked, the other checkboxes are enabled. Custom attributes: Defining the custom attributes for our Number Field is largely an exercise in reviewing the configuration options available in the documentation for Ext.form.NumberField, and deciding which options are most useful to be included. You need to also take into account that some configuration options are already included when you define an APEX item using your plug-in. For example, Item Label is included with an APEX item, but is rendered separately from the item, so don't need to be included. Likewise Value Required is a validation rule, and is also separate when rendering the APEX item. The following next screenshot shows some Ext.form.NumberField configuration options, overlaid with the custom attributes defined in APEX for the plug-in: I've chosen not to include the allowBlank config option as a custom attribute, simply because this can be determined by the APEX Value Required property. Other Configuration options, such as allowDecimals and allowNegative, are included as custom attributes as Yes/No types. The custom attributes created are listed in the following table: Custom events: Custom events are used to define JavaScript event that can be exposed to dynamic actions. For this simple plug-in, there is no need to define any custom events. At this point, we are done defining the Number Field in APEX; it's time to turn our attention to building the database package to execute the Callbacks to render and validate the plug-in.

  Moodle 1.9: The English Teacher's Cookbook 80 simple but incredibly effective recipes for teaching reading comprehension, writing, and composing using Moodle 1.9 Creating a tree diagram using Microsoft Word A tree diagram is used to compare two different situations, topics, persons, or ideas in the same category. As opposed to a Venn diagram, in a tree diagram there are no similarities, so we are going to try to deal with two different topics to explore as many differences as possible. We can work with vocabulary, adjectives, and linking devices. A suitable piece of writing in this case would be an essay or article expressing the different views. As regards the drawing of the tree diagram, it may be either horizontal or vertical, so we are going to carry out both of them. Let's get ready to work! Getting ready We are going to draw a tree diagram about two different cultures and create two links to websites so that students can finish the diagrams. In this case, we are going to design them using Microsoft Word, but you are free to choose any other editor. In this recipe, we will be dealing with two countries whose customs are totally different—Egypt and Greenland. How to do it... You will be designing the tree diagram in Microsoft Word and comparing several aspects of both countries. The students are to complete the information provided by the websites from where they are to take the information. Therefore, in the following activity we are going to design a reading comprehension activity, a prewriting activity, and a writing one. Open Microsoft Word and follow these steps: Click on Insert and choose SmartArt, then choose Hierarchy, and select Horizontal Hierarchy, as shown in the next screenshot: Insert two diagrams, one for Egypt and another one for Greenland, as shown in the following screenshot: Save the file. How it works... We are going to create a writing activity in our Moodle course, so select the Weekly outline section where you want to place it. We will design it through an Essay within a Quiz, so these are the steps that you have to follow: Click on Add an activity and select Advanced uploading of files. Complete the Assignment name block. Complete the Description block and create links to the two websites, one about Greenland and another one about Egypt. Insert a link for the tree diagram file. Click on Save and return to course. The activity appears as shown in the next screenshot: Pictures in a tree diagram—creating a tree diagram using creately.com We are going to create a tree diagram using images instead of words. Students are free to combine the pictures in their future writing, though we have to be very careful in choosing the right pictures. In this case, we are going to use the following website: http://creately.com, which is an excellent resource from our wonderful Web 2.0. Getting ready We are going to enter the website that we have mentioned before and we are going to sign in. Afterwards, we are going to choose a template to work with. In this case, we can select Decision Tree 1 or Blank Diagram to create it ourselves. Here I have decided to work with the first mentioned template. How to do it... These are the steps that you have to follow in order to create the tree diagram with images using the http://creately.com website: Write a name for the document in the Document Name block. Choose the template that you want to work with, as shown in the next screenshot: Click on Create document. Drag and drop the images on the left-hand side and complete the diagram with pictures. Save the diagram. How it works... After virtually drawing the diagram, we are going to get into our Moodle course and choose the Weekly outline section where we want to place the activity. In this case, we are going to create a Forum activity in which students can choose a title for this story, that is to say they are going to brainstorm using this diagram. These are the steps that you have to follow: Click on Add an activity and select Forum. Complete the Forum name and Forum introduction. Go back to the website of the tree diagram and click on Embed image, as shown in the next screenshot: Click on Select and Copy, as shown in the next screenshot: Go back to the Moodle course and click on the Toggle HTML Source icon and paste the embedding code. Then click on the same icon again. Click on Save and return to course. The activity appears as shown in the next screenshot: There's more... You can also design a writing activity since the prewriting process was carried out by the Forum activity. Students brainstormed among themselves and gathered a lot of data in order to write a story. Designing a writing activity out of the tree diagram You can create an Upload a single file activity or an Offline one in which students write what they have discussed in the Forum. They may have written the story while discussing, but that is the first part of the process of writing. So the final draft is what you are going to design here.